Living next door to Russia: How Moscow's war in Ukraine sparked a seismic shift in Finland

By David Mac Dougall • Updated: 10/03/2022

People hold banners and Ukrainian flags during a protest against the Russia invasion, in Helsinki, Saturday, March 5, 2022 - Copyright Credit: AP

"A Russian is a Russian" the old Finnish saying goes, "even if you fry him in butter."

While political leaders have warned against holding individual Russians responsible for Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, this one phrase -- that everything except Russians tastes better after being fried in butter -- sums up an ingrained wariness in the national psyche when it comes to attitudes about their huge eastern neighbour.

With a 1,300-kilometre shared border -- the longest in the European Union -- more than a hundred years as part of the Russian Empire, and two bloody wars in the 20th century (not to mention a couple of decades of Finlandisation, when the Kremlin had the final say on any major political decisions), the Finns like to think they know a thing or two about dealing with Russia.

Even the canny Finns, though, were caught by surprise at the speed of developments that unfolded since 24 February, when Russia invaded Ukraine.

In just two weeks there's already been a seismic shift for politics, business and society in the Nordic nation. And the question of an application to join NATO, long since put on the back burner of public debate, has become the number one subject of political discourse from Hanko in the south to Utsjoki in the north, and all points in between.

The issue is certainly getting a good airing - or to use another Finnish phrase, the cat has been put on the table.

"I think everything has changed in a few weeks. The European Union has changed a lot. And the discussion has changed totally. And it's understandable when people are very afraid," says Jussi Saramo, the deputy leader of Finland's Left Alliance party, one of the five which make up the government coalition.

In light of the Russian invasion, the Left Alliance will launch an internal debate with a view to overhauling and updating their foreign and security policies - perhaps even a shift to being more positive on NATO, something unthinkable this time last month.

That party, and the whole government, already crossed some invisible policy line when they approved the export of offensive weapons to Ukraine, to be used against Russia. The Finnish default of not poking the bear has been thoroughly cast aside.

File picture of the Finnish Parliament, Eduskunta, Helsinki

David Mac Dougall

Most politicians still wary on the NATO question

Finland's security policy timeline can be split into the period before the Russian invasion of Ukraine when only two parties in parliament were advocates of applying to join NATO; and after the invasion, with every Finnish political party now actively debating the question of becoming a member of the military alliance, and a number of MPs openly changing their mind in favour of applying.

Vladimir Putin's pre-invasion rhetoric threatened political and military consequences for Finland if it made NATO overtures: and if Putin's intention was to silence any Finnish debate, he badly miscalculated.

But it's not completely cut and dried: a poll this week of all 200 Finnish MPs by public broadcaster Yle asking simply whether Finland should join NATO got 58 replies saying 'yes'. Just 9 came out directly and said 'no', while 15 said 'maybe' and 118 didn't answer at all, suggesting many MPs are still working out their own position.

While two recent opinion polls found that (within the margin of error) 50% of Finns now support joining Nato, some MPs are likely waiting to see if there's a sustained swing in public opinion - even if support right now is higher than it's ever been.

Jussi Saramo says he's been impressed by the way President Niinistö, who leads on foreign policy outside the EU, has worked with the leaders of all the parties in parliament, not just those in government, to find consensus during the Ukraine crisis.

"I think it's a very Finnish way to work on this issue," the south Finland MP tells Euronews.

"Our message has been that everybody should stay calm. It's not like Putin is attacking Finland tomorrow, he has a lot of problems in Ukraine right now. So we have time to analyse it and work properly without panic. Even if it seems that some parties and some media are giving people panic [about the imminent need to apply to join NATO] without reason."

File picture of Hesburger restaurant

Vesa-Matti Väärä / Hesburger

Consumers push wholesale pivot away from the Russian market

If the discussion about Finland's security policy position has evolved quickly, then the issue of Finnish companies doing business with Russia has become a hot topic just as fast.

Although only 4% of Finnish export trade is with Russia, and trade in both directions slumped during the COVID pandemic, the Helsinki Chamber of Commerce estimates that 90% of Finnish businesses will be impacted somehow by sanctions and divestment in Russia. Given the shared border and innumerable personal contacts between the two countries, it's no surprise perhaps how deeply the impact is felt.

In the last two weeks, at breakneck speed, Russian products have been cleared from Finnish supermarket shelves; Russian vodka is gone from the state-run Alko stores; Finnish businesses say they'll stop using Russian raw materials in their products, stop selling consumer goods imported from Russia, and stop selling their own products in Russian markets.

Even grocery chain Lidl, which has a promotion coming up on food items from Eastern Europe, says it won't sell any of the 'Russian' products even though they're not actually made in Russia.

File picture at S-Group Prisma supermarket in St. Petersburg, Russia

One of Finland's big two retail chains S-Group -- with annual income in excess of €10 billion -- is closing and selling more than a dozen supermarkets in Russia, and trying to find buyers for its two Sokos brand hotels in St. Petersburg as well, as rapid divestment becomes the order of the day.

Companies that didn't move quickly enough like fast-food chain Hesburger, are feeling a backlash from the public - a reaction "like a bear shot in the ass", as Finns would say. The company first announced it was keeping its 44 Russia and Belarus restaurants open while closing its Ukraine outlets, but had to backtrack within a few hours after a negative public outcry.

Even beloved Finnish confectionery and bakery brand Fazer had to admit it was slow to react to unfolding events before finally shuttering its Russian business interests - but not before mocked-up images of its signature chocolate bar drenched in blood were shared widely on social media, including by politicians.

"I think the reaction on social media has been very strong. Consumers have reacted strongly. And since we have very many Finnish consumer product companies in Russia, they were required to leave, or at least publish something about leaving, immediately," explains Pia Pakarinen, CEO of the Helsinki Chamber of Commerce.

The Finnish labour market ideal has also been turned on its head in a matter of weeks: usually, the rights of employees would be a major consideration for Finnish companies when making business decisions. But faced with an almost immediate exit from the Russian market, that has gone out the window.

"Normally the public is against laying off employees, and mentioning their wellbeing would be a good sign. But in this case, it doesn't mean anything," says Pakarinen, a former deputy mayor of Helsinki from the National Coalition Party.

Finnish PM Sanna Marin, left, welcomes Swedish PM Magdalena Andersson in Helsinki, 5th March 2022

Roni Rekomaa/Lehtikuva

Protecting Finland's Russian population

A legacy of Finland's long shared history with Russia, and a product of geography, are the tens of thousands of Russians who make Finland their home, and thousands more Finns who speak Russian as their first language.

There's been a strong message from the country's leaders, and even its security services, on ensuring the safety of those people.

"There is no place in Finland for any kind of violence or vandalism against ordinary people, regardless of where they are or what language they speak," Prime Minister Sanna Marin said at the beginning of March, in between a whirlwind of diplomatic meetings with her counterparts from Sweden and Estonia. Her ministers too have been shuttling around the region for talks with their Nordic and Baltic opposite numbers.

In a rare show of political unity, Finland's parliamentary parties issued a statement of support for people of Russian origin, calling for them not to be discriminated against or harassed "because of the war started by the Kremlin".

"No-one is to blame for the situation in Ukraine simply because of their origin or language," the parties said.

For a country that can often be quite set in its ways in many respects, Finns have seen an unprecedented pace of change when it comes to Russia in the last fortnight.

There is a cost to all this change: whether it's the removal of a Soviet-era peace statue in a Helsinki park; the impact of trade sanctions on so many businesses; Finnair services cancelled because they can't overfly Russia to their main Asian markets; and political and cultural upheaval around security and NATO.

But it seems that so far, Finns are mostly okay with this evolution, with paying this high price.

Or to use another Finnish phrase, they're willing to pay the price of strawberries.

What do Russians think of Putin's invasion of Ukraine?

By Anastasia Trofimova • Updated: 03/03/2022

Four Russians tell Euronews their views on Moscow's invasion of Ukraine - 

 Copyright Credit: Anastasia Trofimova


“Guys, where’s the main protest?” asks 28-year-old Ksenia, who’s taken to the street to protest for the first time in her life.

It’s 9 pm in Moscow and the police have already broken up the bulk of the protests. Since anyone with anti-war signs is arrested immediately, protesters casually stroll along until a large enough crowd gathers to shout their opposition to what's going on in Ukraine.

Two middle-aged women hiss “no war!” to the police before running away, laughing nervously.

“Let’s work, go!” the policeman orders his underlings. A group of three young police officers take off down the street but don’t find any suitable targets. They finally spot a man, who, as he's being dragged to the police van, is revealed to be very drunk. He is released.

The protesters trickle along smaller streets, following location updates from dedicated Telegram channels. Convoys of police vans follow. It’s a massive game of cat and mouse. The night ends with a 39-year-old man driving a car into the police barriers at Pushkin Square with signs “This is war!” and “Rise up, people!” The car starts to burn; the man is arrested.


On the sixth day of the war in Ukraine, there have been more than 6,000 arrests at anti-war protests across Russia.

Ksenia

Credit: Anastasia Trofimova

“The night of (the invasion), I was in a really great mood," recalls Ksenia. "My friend and I were celebrating February 23 (Day of the Defender of the Fatherland or, more commonly, Men’s Day).

"We were outside, drinking wine and singing on the swings. At 6:05 am Forbes announced Putin declared the start of the military operation. And that’s it. My world divided into a before and after.”

Ksenia works in PR and speaks bluntly.

“Putin is crazy. No sane person would do anything like this. Ukraine will persevere. Meanwhile, we’re going to be in [the] shit.”

'It's been a long time coming'

“You’re not one of those liberals, are you?” asks 49-year-old Yuri. He’s not a fan of anti-war protesters like Ksenia.

Yuri

Credit: Anastasia Trofimova

“I’m against the war. But to be honest, it’s been a long time coming. The problem is not with Ukraine, but with those Anglo-Saxons who are creeping upon us. Just look at what happened to countries they’ve got into, like Syria. And now they’re trying to get at us (create internal strife) via Ukraine. Therefore, I think all of this is justified and right.”

The liberals that Yuri hates would respond in kind by calling him “a victim of the zombie-box”, or state television. This ideological division runs through many Russian families. However, Yuri’s sentiment is too common to dismiss as crazy talk on the fringes.

The fear of NATO was and is very real here. Examples of Yugoslavia and Libya, two states bombed by NATO forces, are used to drive fears that Russia may be next. The day before the start of the war, Putin told the nation of WWII-era promises not to expand NATO eastward and said those promises had been broken five times. Ukraine's flirtation with NATO membership pushed those fears into overdrive.

Nikita

Credit: Anastasia Trofimova

Yuri is one of many seeing the events through a prism of fear.

“If I’m called up, I’ll go," he said. "Russians are not afraid of the army. All of us have children. At least my children will be protected.”

What does he think of the sanctions on Russia?

“Our people have always been under some type of sanctions. We’re used to it. If we survived during the hunger and sieges, we’ll make it.”

It’s sunny, people are taking selfies on Red Square, while a long convoy of National Guard buses rolls by the Kremlin walls. More protests are expected.

Nikita, 20, tells Euronews: “I’m mostly against war. But I don’t know what I would’ve done in the place of the government. If war didn’t start now, then maybe five or six years down the road Ukraine could’ve joined NATO and the consequences would’ve been much different for our country. Of course, I really feel bad for the ordinary people who cannot influence their government’s decisions.” Do you mean Russians or Ukrainians, Nikita is asked. “All of us. Our guys are dying over there and so are Ukrainians.”

Olesya

Credit: Anastasia Trofimova

“I’m against war," said Olesya, 45, who has most of her relatives in the separatist region of Donbas. "But I think this should’ve been done in 2014 and then we wouldn’t have war today. Where was the West, with all its humanitarian concerns, when the Ukrainians shelled the people of Donbas?”

The war in eastern Ukraine broke out in 2014 after Russia annexed Crimea. Next, two separatist regions in Donbas, Donetsk and Luhansk, declared their independence from Kyiv. It sparked a conflict between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists, which has seen casualties on both sides.

But even though justification of the Ukraine invasion can be found among Russians, there have been no demonstrations of support.

On the contrary, the people taking to the streets are those against it, despite threats of arrests. Most Russians have family and friends in Ukraine.

“War is always awful. War never leads to anything good and won’t this time either,” – says 18-year-old Tonya, wearing a bag with a hand-stitched "No war" sign.

“I’m scared and hurt for my friends in Ukraine, who write to me ‘we’re going down into the bomb shelter’. We joke, ‘It’s been an explosive morning, hasn’t it?’ and she says, ‘It’s been simply bombastic’. In the past three days, I’ve slept for 10 hours in total. The rest of the time I’m crying”.

A war with a country with the strongest historical and cultural ties to Russia was laughable, ridiculous, absurd. Until February 24, 2022. Putin’s attack on Ukraine took most Russians by surprise.

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SOROS FOUNDATION SEZ

Only one view prevails in Russia - that of madness and destruction | View

Updated: 07/03/2022
By Alexander Soros
Opinions expressed in View articles are solely those of the authors.

As Russian forces advanced on the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, Russia’s Supreme Court finally terminated the existence of Memorial, Russia’s oldest and best-known human rights group.

The timing was a grim reminder of what is now in jeopardy as a result of Putin’s criminal aggression against Ukraine, and how much is at stake.

For even amid the brutal military attack, Ukraine still has what Russia under Putin has lost: independent media, independent judges, human rights groups, anti-corruption activists, and others who strive to make ensure the system work for everyone, even the weakest. We call that civil society. It is the essence of a robust and vibrant democracy. For Putin, it is anathema.

The Open Society Foundations have been supporting civil society across Eastern Europe and Eurasia, and around the world, for three decades. That included opening a foundation in Ukraine in 1990, the International Renaissance Foundation; the projects it has supported have included everything from ending corruption in the awarding of university degrees to supporting reforms of the public health system and developing a system of accessible legal aid.

We used to work in Russia too, supporting legal reforms, fighting against the spread of HIV/Aids, and even paying the salaries for a while of former Soviet scientists. But that was all before Putin shut everything all down. Scared by popular unrest that overturned strong-man allies in Georgia, in Yugoslavia, and in Ukraine too, Putin decided that independent civil society was a threat to his consolidation of power. He will do the same again if he prevails in Ukraine.

So what should we, as a philanthropic fund, do?

With hundreds of thousands of people streaming out of Ukraine, and millions of civilians in harm's way, the demands for humanitarian assistance are huge, and a massive humanitarian assistance operation is moving ahead.

But supporting Ukraine’s hopes for an independent, democratic future -- and more broadly challenging Vladimir Putin’s assault on liberal, democratic government across Eastern Europe and Central Asia -- involves more than a humanitarian response. It calls for a redoubling of support for the idea of an open society, and for the myriad voices and groups who stand up for human dignity and accountable government -- in Kazakhstan, in Hungary, in Poland, in Moldova, in Kyrgyzstan, in Armenia -- all voices that can be mobilised now in solidarity with Ukraine. All voices that Vladimir Putin wants to silence.

That is why we have launched the Ukraine Democracy Fund with a $25 million (€23 million) commitment to support not only Ukraine’s now beleaguered civil society groups but also those across the region. And it is why we are inviting other private funders, including philanthropists and the private sector, to contribute. We hope the fund will eventually total over $100 million (€91 million). Russia itself provides the example of what is at stake.

The closure of Memorial was just part of the silencing of independent voices as Putin gradually expanded his power -- which included the murder of some of the bravest individuals -- such as human rights activists Natalia Estemirova and Stanislav Markelov, both killed in 2009, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, shot dead in 2006, and opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in 2015. Today, the country’s leading opposition figure, Alexei Navalny, is serving a two-and-a-half-year sentence in a penal colony, having barely survived an attempt to poison him in 2020 with the nerve agent Novichok.

So, now in Russia, there is no organised opposition to Putin’s war. No mass protests. No critical debate on TV channels entirely controlled by Putin and his cronies. In a closed society, one view prevails -- even if it is the voice of madness and destruction.

Today we cannot foresee the outcome in Ukraine, and the future fills many of us with deep foreboding, as we recall the Nazi seizure of Czechoslovakia in 1938.

But while the military struggle continues, Open Society and our partners will continue to support our Ukraine foundation and all the groups they work with, and other independent voices across the region. We will push back against the silence.

Eventually, the guns will fall silent. When they do, whatever the outcome, we know where we will stand: with those who understand that the survival of humanity, and our ability to overcome the existential challenges we face, demands not the dog-eat-dog savagery of a Vladimir Putin, but a tolerant, democratic open society.

Alexander Soros is deputy chair of the Open Society Foundations.

UK man, 19, who works at Subway, goes to Ukraine to fight Russians with zero military background

He signed up with the Ukrainian forces for two years.


Belmont Lay |  March 13, 2022

A 19-year-old UK man, who loves video games and worked at a local Subway outlet, signed up to fight Russians in Ukraine and went over within 36 hours, despite having zero relevant combat military experience.

This turn of events, which has left his family incredulous, was reported by ITV Granada.

The mother of the post-pubescent teen, Jamie, approached the outlet to reveal what happened to her son.

What happened

Jamie's mother, who refused to be named, revealed that her son does not speak Polish or Ukrainian.

via ITV Granada

All the lad did was email a website that was facilitating the recruitment of foreign fighters to join the Ukrainians and booked a one-way ticket that cost £45 (S$79).

He then travelled on a child's passport on March 5 from Manchester, UK to Warsaw, Poland, where he would cross the border into Ukraine.

His mother said he had never left the country prior to this trip.

In total, he signed up and went to Ukraine all within 36 hours.

Influenced by online content

The mother said her son was influenced by online comments and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss who supported those who want to fight Russians.

The mother of three said there was no vetting involved, and instead Jamie was simply accepted and told where to meet others like him once he landed in Poland.

The lack of vetting extended to the lack of alarm bells going off when Jamie's introductory email contained a spelling error, suggesting he was not even old enough.

When Jamie contacted the London-based organisation, he wrote: "Hello, I am here to sign up to help ukrain fight off Russia. I was told to email you to get more information."

The organisation wrote back and thanked Jamie for his support and asked him to fill out a form, adding a note to say he should only book tickets if he had military/ combat or medical, rescue, fire fighting or mechanical experience.

Jamie wrote back saying he had booked his flight to Poland.

He is believed to have crossed into Ukraine by March 7.

Loved video games

In comments reported by ITV Granada, the mother sounded exasperated as she said her son had only completed just one year of Army Cadets when he was at school.

Jamie's mother also said her son enjoyed playing Call of Duty.

"He hasn't got any military experience or anything like that -- it's just literally from Call of Duty," the mother said.

"He's never shot a rifle or anything like that."

Despite his paltry military background experience, she was aghast he still managed to sign a contract with the Ukrainian forces for at least two years.

Jamie's mother said the teen goes to work to make sandwiches and comes home to watch videos of soldiers and refugees in Ukraine, as well as videos of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

His internet search history was littered with news about what was happening in Ukraine.

Family got in contact with him in Ukraine

The family then tried to use geo-tracking tech to locate Jamie.

The last place he was at was just miles from the border with Lviv, a large western Ukrainian city.

Once he crossed into Ukraine the site stopped working.

Some 24 hours later, Jamie messaged his family to confirm he had signed up to join the ground forces.

The text exchange in the morning after 9am read:

Jamie: I'm in I've signed the contract and got the here

Gear

Family: For how long? Are you ok?

We have been worried

Jamie: Until marshal law is over

Family: Are you ok

Jamie: I'm fine got here last night, going on a run in a second but I'm surrounded by the whole world so it's amazing

Will speak to you later

Family: Stay safe please

Jamie: I will as I stated the whole world's around me.

Got people from every where

Family: Try to keep in touch please as often as you can

Jamie: I will send a message every morning saying I'm alive and healthy and that's it

Family: That's enough, I just want to hear your safe xx love you

Family still shocked

The mother told ITV Granada: "Every day you're just waiting, I'm constantly on my laptop, on my phone, just checking."

His uncle added: "In the eyes of the law he is an adult, but if you look at the email he sent it says 'I want to come and fight Russia', it even has spelling mistakes -- an email like that you'd hope they'd pick it up."

"The fact that in 36 hours he was able to sign up is unbelievable."

"He didn't take anything with him, he just told us, 'I've got my army cadet uniform'."

UK authorities said it is advises against travelling to Ukraine and anyone who travels to conflict zones to engage in unlawful activity, should expect to be investigated upon their return to the UK.

All media via ITV Granada

Ex-tennis pro Stakhovsky in Ukraine ‘with a gun in my hands’

By HOWARD FENDRICH

March 12, 2022

-Sergiy Stakhovsky of Ukraine reacts as he wins against Roger Federer of Switzerland in their men's second round singles match at the All England Lawn Tennis Championships in Wimbledon, London, Wednesday, June 26, 2013. About 1 1/2 months after the last match of Sergiy Stakhovsky’s professional tennis career, the 36-year-old Ukrainian left his wife and three young children in Hungary and went back to his birthplace to help however he could during Russia’s invasion. 

(AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus, File)


About 1 1/2 months after the last match of Sergiy Stakhovsky’s professional tennis career, the 36-year-old Ukrainian left his wife and three young children in Hungary and went back to his birthplace to help however he could during Russia’s invasion.

“I don’t have the words to describe it. I would never imagine in my life that it would come to this — that I would be in my home city ... with a gun in my hands,” Stakhovsky said Saturday, rubbing his left cheek with his palm during a video interview with The Associated Press from what he said was a residential building in Kyiv, Ukraine’s beleaguered capital.

“A lot of people are saying that they’re waking up and hoping ... it was just a bad dream. But, you know, on Day 16, (that) doesn’t work anymore,” he said. “First couple of days, (it’s) surreal. You don’t believe that it’s actually happening. And the next thing you know, you get used to it, and you’re just trying to find a way of helping your country to actually survive.”

At age 12, eyeing a life in tennis, Stakhovsky began splitting his time between Ukraine and the Czech Republic to improve his game. He turned pro in 2003, won four titles in singles and another four in doubles, and earned more than $5 million in prize money. Highlights included rising to a best ATP ranking of No. 31 in 2010, reaching the third round of Grand Slam tournaments six times, and pulling off one of the biggest upsets in the sport’s history when he ended Roger Federer’s record streak of 36 consecutive major quarterfinal appearances by beating him 6-7 (5), 7-6 (5), 7-5, 7-6 (5) in the second round at Wimbledon in 2013.

In January, Stakhovsky walked away from the sport after losing to American J.J. Wolf in the first round of qualifying for the Australian Open.

Retirement did not go as planned. On Feb. 24, Russia began attacking Ukraine. In the wee hours of Feb. 28, Stakhovsky arrived in Kyiv.

“You’re one second safe. The next second, something flies in, and no one is safe,” he said.

He said he’s received hundreds of messages of support from members of the tennis world -- players, coaches, officials -- and mentioned a few by name: Richard Gasquet, Lucas Pouille, Aljaz Bedene and Novak Djokovic, the 20-time Grand Slam champion whose text messages Stakhovsky shared via social media.

Working with what he described as a branch of the Ukraine armed forces that can only be used inside the city premises — he said it was created “a couple of years back to actually support the infrastructure of the city in case of war, which nobody actually believed in, but unfortunately did happen” — Stakhovsky said his days are divided into two-hour shifts followed by six hours off.

That “off” time, he said, is often spent with what he called humanitarian efforts.

“Just trying to do whatever we can on a 24/7 basis,” Stakhovsky said, “because otherwise you’re going to go crazy.”

He said he still has family who live, and have remained, in Kyiv, including his grandmother, father and a brother.

As for how long he will stay, Stakhovsky isn’t sure.

“I hope not long,” he said. “I hope this will get resolved rather fast and short.”

Later this month, his daughter turns 8 and one son turns 4; the other son is 6 1/2.

He did not tell them where he was going — and why — before he left.

“They’re fairly young and I just don’t believe they would understand the meaning of war. And I don’t believe they would understand any of it. My wife knew ... but she never asked the direct question, and I never told her directly. So when ... I told her ‘I’m leaving,’ she started crying. So there was not really a conversation,” he recounted.

He said communicating with the children now is not any easier.

“It’s tough to call with kids, because every time they ask, ‘When are you coming?’ or ‘What are you doing?’ I’m just, ‘I don’t know, honestly.’ For me, it’s not a right decision to be here and it was not the right decision to stay home. Any of this is not right,” Stakhovsky said. “But I am here because I believe that the future of my country — and the future of my kids, and the future of Europe as we know it — is under great danger. And if there’s anything I can do to change the outcome, I will try to do it.”

___

Follow Howard Fendrich on Twitter at https://twitter.com/HowardFendrich

___

More AP tennis: https://apnews.com/hub/tennis and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

UK Court Denies Assange’s Extradition Appeal


Julian Assange's petition to appeal was denied by the UK Supreme Court. Mar. 14, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/@WeForNew

Published 14 March 2022

On Monday, the United Kingdom Supreme Court dropped Julian Assange's appeal in light of the extradition process against him.

WikiLeaks co-founder, Julian Assange's legal defense filed a petition to appeal on January 24, in light of a potential extradition process to the U.S., where he faces espionage charges and could be sentenced to a 175-year condemnation in a high-security “supermax” prison. On Monday the UK Supreme Court denied Assange permission to appeal in the case.

Home Secretary Priti Patel is in charge of authorizing whether Assange will be extradited. The reason behind the Supreme Court's refusal of the appeal petition has not yet been released. The announcement of the denied petition was made public by WikiLeaks and Assange's fiancé, Stella Morris, on social networks.

Last December, Assange's legal defense presented a petition to appeal, stating that the U.S. guarantees about not holding him in solitary and refraining from employing psychological torture techniques o him were unconvincing and citing Amnesty International to that effect. This petition was granted in January by the UK High Court.

Assange has been detained in the Belmarsh prison since his arrest in April of 2019. On Saturday, Stella Morris, disclosed via Twitter, that the Belmarsh prison had granted them permission to wed, the nuptial ceremony is scheduled for March 23. However, given the current circumstances it is unclear if the permission remains.

Assange lived for seven years in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where UK authorities denied him permission to leave due to a Swedish lead investigation for alleged sexual misconduct, which was later dismissed. In 2019, Washington's unsealing of an indictment related to the journalist's 2010 publication of classified U.S. documents, related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, confirmed that UK authorities' actions were only a pretext to get him extradited to the U.S.

PRISON NATION USA

US Private Prisons Are Big Business at Expense of Human Rights


People demanding the U.S. government to stop funding private prisons. | Photo: Twitter/ @PresenteOrg

Published 14 March 2022

The United States has the largest prison population of more than 2 million and the highest prison population rate of 629 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants.

Driven by a motive to seek profits, a system originally designed for rehabilitation has become "big business" that thrives on violations of the human rights of migrants and minorities, said a Mexican expert in strategic studies, referring to private prisons in the United States.

Private prisons were founded in the 1980s to make up for bed shortages in federal and state ones. The U.S. government pays private prison management companies for each inmate, so the more prisoners, the higher the earnings, said Raul Benitez Manaut, a professor at the Center for Research on North America at Mexico's National Autonomous University.

This money-making endeavor has been supported by what he calls the U.S. "iron fist" policy on street crime, which for the past 30 years has "given the police incentives to send more people to prison for minor crimes, in collusion with prosecutors and judges." Prison privatization in the U.S., on the rise in the last three decades, has adulterated the essence of the prison system by turning it into business whose profitability relies on the number of inmates.

The U.S. has the largest prison population of more than 2 million and the highest prison population rate of 629 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the latest data from the Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research at the School of Law of Birkbeck of University of London. Low-income groups and ethnic minorities are the main victims of the police and judicial practices feeding private prisons.

Black and Latino Americans were incarcerated at about 5 times and 1.3 times respectively the rate of white Americans, according to the U.S. News and World Report in October 2021. "The Black population is larger than the white one in U.S. prisons because many Afro-descendants do not have the money to pay for a lawyer and avoid jail," said Benitez, adding that "judges normally favor the white population, and often punish the Black and Latino population, so those are human rights violations."

The rise in undocumented migrants heading to the U.S. has benefited owners of private detention centers, as they receive money for each migrant held, and employ detainees as extremely cheap labor. The criminalization of immigration has contributed to the high number of people behind bars, and many migrants are held in detention centers operated by private companies, where their human rights are violated or limited.

As of September 2021, 79 percent of people detained each day in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody were held in private detention facilities, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The GEO Group and CoreCivic are the two largest owners, managers and operators of private prisons in the United States, with combined revenue in 2020 of more than US$4 billion.

The companies are also large donors to political campaigns, such as that of former U.S. President Donald Trump, and hire firms to lobby for their interests among lawmakers and in the upper echelons of U.S. power.

Benitez said that government officials, from the local and regional levels and up, and operators of private prisons benefit from the current system, with which in mind the federal government "cannot and does not want to" eradicate prison privatization. "It's a vicious circle."

Russia: The West Underestimates the Power of State Media

Many people’s often sole reliance on Russian state television has shaped an ideological view of the world that is divorced from many of the realities of Putin’s authoritarian governance.

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with government members via a video link in Moscow, March 10, 2022.

 Photo: Sputnik/Mikhail Klimentyev/Kremlin via Reuters

Stephen Cushion
THE CONVERSATION

MARCH 13,2022

Many western countries have a wide range of news sources that are free from direct government interference. From the development of multi-channel television, rolling 24-hour news journalism, to the ever-expanding choice, immediacy and reach of online and social media, the infrastructure of western national media systems makes it hard for states to cease control of the news agenda. But this may have led many people in the west to underestimate the power of Russia’s state-controlled media.

Academics have even begun to talk about a post-broadcasting age, driven by digital media that will soon replace rather than supplement television viewing. In this new communications environment, audiences are often celebrated for being savvy and active – and able to resist media power and influence.

Also read: Twitter to Cut Spread of BelTa, Other Belarus State Media Posts

But in Russia, with a state-controlled information environment and limited access to independent journalism, the digital age of communications has not delivered the kind of freedoms associated with 21st-century western media.

As BBC News’s Moscow correspondent Steve Rosbenberg revealed six days into the invasion of Ukraine, Russian people’s reliance on state television appears to have influenced their response to warfare. He interviewed a Russian pensioner who depended on state TV to understand what is happening in the world and her response was chilling:

A lot of what they say on TV, it’s truth. It’s true… You know, when I read in a foreign newspaper that Russians bomb Kharkiv and so on, I know that it’s not true because they promised not to do this and they will never do this.

In another BBC story, it was reported that Oleksandra, a young Russian woman living in Kharkiv, called her mother in Moscow to tell her the city was under heavy artillery attack, and that Ukrainian civilians were being killed. But her response was it had probably happened by accident because the Russian military would not deliberately target civilians. According to Oleksandra, her “mum exactly quoted Russian TV. They are just brainwashing people. And people trust them”. Interviews with ordinary Russians on the streets also reinforce Putin’s narrative and justification for warfare.

This unquestioning faith in Russian state media and, by extension, Putin’s actions, has influenced public opinion over many years. Of course, it is difficult to interpret how representative individual Russian testimony is without systematic polling of public opinion. Independent pre-war surveys have suggested Putin remains a popular leader because he is seen to represent and understand ordinary Russians, having rebuilt and stabilised the economy since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The power of Russian state TV

Since the invasion of Ukraine, journalists across the western world have covered Putin’s unprovoked attack, reporting from basements and underground stations to not just cover Russian military atrocities, but to uncover and convey the devastating human impact.

Also read: Meta To Bar Russian State Media From Running Ads, Monetising On Platform

By contrast, Russian state TV channels have all but blacked out the harsh realities of warfare and humanitarian catastrophe. As Feo Snagovsky – an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alberta – has observed, these are slickly produced newscasts where: “Correspondents don’t just read government talking points straight from the page … they make it seem like they’re considering “both sides” through brief clips of western politicians. However, inevitably these claims are ‘corrected’ by their own politicians.“

Of course, states have long tried to influence the media in times of conflict. Yet in today’s digital media environment it has become increasingly challenging to censor western media. But Russian authorities have tightly controlled Putin’s narrative by limiting people’s access to media that challenges his perspective and ensuring that state media closely follows the Kremlin’s script.

Russian journalists are not reporting on a war, or even an invasion or attack. The state requires them to label it a “special operation”, designed to protect the country’s security in the face of an expanding Nato alliance. Any news organisations deviating from the government’s playbook have been ordered to close by Russian authorities.

Meanwhile, access to independent sources of news online and across social media platforms have been significantly cut off by the Russian government. And new legislation has been passed that allows the Russian authorities to jail anyone reporting what they determine to be “fake news” about what is happening in Ukraine.

Controlling the opposition

Many people’s often sole reliance on Russian state television has shaped an ideological view of the world that is divorced from many of the realities of Putin’s authoritarian governance. Putin’s international conflicts – including warfare in nearby Chechnya and Crimea – have been largely sanitised in Russia media with any public or media opposition swiftly suppressed.

But how long Putin can control the narrative of his “special operation” remains to be seen. Once the west’s sanctions begin to hit ordinary Russians and their social and cultural isolation from the world cuts through, they may want to search for themselves a new reality independent of state media.


Stephen Cushion, Chair Professor, Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Culture, Cardiff University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Once, cultural ties to Russia were deliberate and hopeful. Now, they're eroding

March 13, 2022
LINDA HOLMESTwitter

NPR


Billy Joel plays in Moscow in 1987.ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content/Getty Images

As a Gen-X kid, I have to admit there was particular poignancy to the news that, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russia isn't getting The Batman.

It's part of a much, much bigger and more important story, of course — several much, much bigger, much more important stories. NPR's Anastasia Tsioulcas has reported on many severed relationships in arts in recent weeks.

All three major music labels have now suspended operations in Russia

Most of these have been attributed not simply to being Russian in and of itself, but to ties to Putin, or to a refusal to repudiate him — and to funding that comes from the Russian government. Some artists have actively spoken against him and against the invasion, but many have not. It's in opera, it's in classical concerts, but it's affecting other things, too: Russia is not being permitted to participate in Eurovision, where it debuted in 1994. Western musicians have been canceling Russian dates ever since the war started. As Elizabeth Blair has reported, Russian cultural organizations inside the U.S. are anxious about possible effects on their own work.

Bon Jovi, Motley Crue, and Ozzy Osbourne played at the Moscow Music Peace Festival in August, 1989.Robert Toning/AP

Connections to Russia were once optimistic

These boycotts are perhaps even more jarring if you remember past periods in which pop culture tried to paint a picture of deliberate, optimistic, post-Cold-War thaw. In the 1980s, particularly in the wake of the policies of glasnost and perestroika in the former Soviet Union — which encouraged openness and reform — artists went to places they wouldn't have gone ten or even five years before. It was in 1987, 35 years ago this July, that Billy Joel brought a big pop-rock show to Leningrad and Moscow; 1989 when Billy Crystal traveled to find his Russian relatives in an HBO special called Midnight Train to Moscow. That year also brought the Moscow Music Peace Festival, with Ozzy Osbourne, Motley Crue, and Bon Jovi among the performers.

At the time, all these things were presented through a lens of, for lack of a better word, a goal of international — and intentional — friendship. Joel's bond with an enthusiastic fan and circus clown named Viktor became one of the centerpieces of the documentary about his trip and the basis for a later song called "Leningrad." ("We never knew what friends we had until we came to Leningrad.")

Ukraine's libraries are offering bomb shelters, camouflage classes and, yes, books

After Putin became president in 2000, some of these events continued. Paul McCartney played in Red Square in 2003 and met with Putin personally. Putin came to the show. Even the popularity of the FX drama series The Americans, which portrayed the Cold War through the eyes of KGB spies who felt just as righteous in their cause as Americans did in theirs, arguably continued this tradition of pop culture as pushing back against simplistic and antagonistic narratives of decades past.

And now all this.

Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with Paul McCartney during their meeting at the Kremlin on May 24, 2003 in Moscow. Getty Images

Even Levi's has halted sales in Russia

This severance of sometimes longstanding relationships isn't only happening in the arts. It's happening just as rapidly in sports, both in the real world and virtually. Russian athletes were barred from the Paralympic Games by the International Olympic Committee. FIFA has banned Russian teams from participating in its soccer matches. Russian teams have even been removed from the popular FIFA 22 video game, and may be removed from other games, too. President Vladimir Putin is seeing symbolic ties to sports withdrawn: The International Judo Federation stripped Putin of honorary titles in that sport, and World Taekwondo withdrew an honorary black belt.

Businesses that one might paint into a mural representing American consumerism have been suspending business in Russia: McDonald's, Coke, Pepsi, Starbucks, Disney. Wall Street saw its first big withdrawal when Goldman Sachs stopped operating there, and while that's an economic move, it feels culturally significant, too. Hollywood studios, major music companies, all ceasing business in Russia — there are even ramifications for sales of one of the items that has often been referenced as a go-to symbol of American cultural presence in other countries: blue jeans.
The impact of cultural boycotts

Does all this matter? It probably depends on what you mean by "matter." As Yasmeen Serhan wrote in The Atlantic earlier this month:

"It's easy to see cultural boycotts as more of a symbolic act than a serious threat to Moscow's geopolitical standing. But by suspending Russia from the world's largest sporting and cultural arenas, these institutions are sending a clear—and, for Putin, potentially damaging—message: If Russia acts beyond the bounds of the rules-based international order in Ukraine, it will be treated as an outsider by the rest of the world."

The idea of culture and sports as stand-ins for the current political climate is obviously not new. I was an enthusiastic Olympics-watching kid during the boycott by the United States of the Moscow Summer Olympics in 1980 and the Soviet Union's boycott of the Los Angeles Summer Olympics in 1984, both of which cost athletes dearly, and both of which carried a heaviness, a sense of a hostile closed door that was consistent with the political rhetoric of the time. And in the last couple of years, the controversies around Russian athletes in the Olympics and the workaround under which sanctions for doping meant they couldn't compete for Russia but only for the "Russian Olympic Committee" brought out some of the grumbling that has soured international competition in the past.

Pianist Van Cliburn performing in the final round of Tchaikovsky International Competition in Moscow in 1958. Cliburn's triumph helped thaw the Cold War.

AP

Why Brittney Griner was in Russia and what it has to do with U.S. women's basketball

And it goes back much farther than that: In the documentary about his trip to Russia, Billy Joel says he was inspired to go partly because he remembered how important it felt to him when he was young and American pianist Van Cliburn won the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958. Joel says in the film that the event, and Russia's embrace of Cliburn, changed his own sense of the country and its people, whom he felt he'd been taught to fear.

The world has always done this — used culture and sports to communicate over and past and through and around politics and aggression — and the question of how important that is, and how productive it is, recurs.

These crossovers of diplomacy and art can be fortuitous or commercial, but they can also be fully orchestrated by governments, and they can be complicated for the artists involved: the U.S. State Department sent jazz musicians, including Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong, around the world in the 1950s to present a positive image of the United States, even as the country utterly failed to treat them equally.

The world has always done this — used culture and sports to communicate over and past and through and around politics and aggression — and the question of how important that is, and how productive it is, recurs.

The efficacy of cultural sanctions certainly remains an open question; Serhan argues that because of the particular shape of his chosen image, Putin will be far more personally bothered and functionally threatened by sports sanctions than by ones in the arts. But she says this, too: "If ordinary Russians can no longer enjoy many of the activities they love, including things as quotidian as watching their soccer teams play in international matches, seeing the latest films, and enjoying live concerts, their tolerance for their government's isolationist policies will diminish."

As performing artists denounce or stay allied with Putin, history offers some lessons

By now, Russians have gotten used to global connections

If that's so, it may turn out that openness — not just concerts in the 1980s, but the growing presence of Hollywood films and the vibrancy of international competition in sports — is not just a cyclical opposite of this period of retraction we've so rapidly entered, but a logical predecessor to it. The idea of depriving ordinary Russians, as Serhan says, of sports and Hollywood films and live concerts by international performers would not be a potent threat had they not come to expect access to those things in the first place.

Ukrainian heritage is in peril. The Smithsonian hopes to rescue what it can

In other words, if bands weren't going to Russia, if world sports leagues weren't thriving, if Hollywood movies weren't earning big money from big audiences in Russia, these arts and sports sanctions would be empty. If you're not part of Eurovision, you can't be excluded from Eurovision. If people don't have expectations of a relatively open cultural and sports world, they can't be disappointed.

As a wildly naive teenager, I did find the idea that anyone could rock out at a concert transformative, capable of papering over what remained deep and troubling problems in world affairs that existed in both my own country and others.

But this is not the way this openness was pitched in the pop culture of the 1980s and 1990s, as something that might be withdrawn later as a result of an invasion; it was pitched as hope, as comity, and as perhaps a permanent realignment. And as a wildly naive teenager, I did find the idea that anyone could rock out at a concert transformative, capable of papering over what remained deep and troubling problems in world affairs that existed in both my own country and others. Even in 1987, Joel was asked whether he was afraid that his visit would be used as cover for human rights issues. His response, so familiar to people who have watched artists navigate these issues, was that he was not a politician.

There will likely be — there will hopefully be — at some time in the future, brought about by different conditions and an end to the war, another newsworthy return to Moscow for an American pop artist. There will be another reopening, another thaw in this cycle. The Gen-X kid in me, the one who remembers being sold hope in that way, anticipates this and will lean toward music and sports for signs of peace, even knowing it's foolish. It isn't that arts or sports are the important ties; it is that they are buoys that bob on the surface of world affairs, and when they move, in response to much greater forces underneath them, we notice.

'Our thoughts are with the Ukrainians' says Iggy Pop as acts pull out of Moscow rock festival

Iggy Pop, Placebo, and Biffy Clyro are among those pulling out of Russian festival Park Live - Copyright Colin Young-Wolff/AP

By Paul Stafford • Updated: 11/03/2022 - 

One after another, internationally renowned musicians are cancelling all upcoming concerts and festival appearances on Russian soil.

Iggy Pop was among the first to withdraw from the Park Live festival in Moscow last week, which is scheduled to take place over three weekends in June and July 2022.

“In light of current events, this is necessary. Our thoughts are with the Ukrainians and all the brave people who oppose this violence and seek peace,” the enigmatic punk rocker noted in a statement posted on Twitter.



Other bands followed suit. Biffy Clyro, The Killers and Placebo all dropped the Park Live festival from their tours, while Green Day, Bjork and Iron Maiden cancelled appearances at various events across Russia in the coming months.

The Revolution Will Be Televised

During the Cold War, Western music was one of the more potent links between the isolated citizens of the Soviet Union and the outside world, seeping through the Iron Curtain in the form of bootlegged, black-market cassette tapes and records.

By 1989, the Glasnost “openness” policy under then General Secretary of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, led to musicians performing live in Moscow to hundreds of thousands of people. But just as these performances reflected an influx of new freedoms for Russian people, so the current cancellations in Russia reflect their erosion.

Most of the bands signed up to Park Live in Moscow this year were also scheduled to play a sister festival in Kyiv called UPARK Festival. Thanks to Russia’s invasion of its neighbour it is now highly unlikely that either event will take place.

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“As it stands the Ukrainian one is in an active war zone and the Russian one all countries are advising against travel to, making it impossible to do for international acts,” said Geoff Meall, an agent at Paradigm Talent Agency who represents the bands Sum 41 and My Chemical Romance. Both bands were due to play at Park Live and UPARK this summer.

“Not that there is anything tangible to actually pull from, as the event, of course, won't happen,” he said. Park Live, which was first held in 2013, has not run since 2019, with the 2020 and 2021 iterations both cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Under Pressure

With Park Live still not officially cancelled, ticket holders, many of whom held onto their tickets initially bought for 2020’s cancelled event, are taking to the festival’s Instagram page to voice their frustrations.

“Longest term investment of my life,” said one user, @juliet.estrina. Many other users complained of not being able to get refunds on their tickets, or criticised the indefinite postponement.

“As you can imagine the organisers of the events there are heartbroken at the turn of events. The Ukrainian team have had to escape Kyiv,” said Meall, about the current situation.

No official comment has been made about the proposed plans for Park Live and there have been no updates about the cancellations since March 3. Meanwhile, comment posting on Park Live’s VK page – a Russian social media platform still largely accessible in Russia – was closed.

Melnitsa International, the organisers of Park Live in Moscow, did not respond to requests for comment, although daily updates on their social media pages only add to the number of cancelled tours and gigs, spelling the end of Western musicians playing live concerts in Russia for the foreseeable future.
Festivals for Peace, not War

The international music community’s growing embargo on playing live in Russia stands in stark contrast to the Moscow Peace Festival, which took place in Luzhniki Stadium (then named the Central Lenin Stadium) on August 12th and 13th of 1989.

'Every coffee break you take costs a life': Ukrainian author criticises world leaders

Former Miss Ukraine describes terrifying escape from Kyiv and asks US to relax visas for refugees

Metal bands from Europe and the US, including The Scorpions, Ozzy Osbourne and Mötley Crüe, played two shows at the festival in the Russian capital to promote peace and the abstention of drug use.

Ironically, many of the musicians who have spoken about the festival in the years since, such as Scorpions frontman Klaus Meine, are quick to mention that many of the party travelling to Moscow were drinking and using drugs the moment the plane took off.

A little over two years later, the Soviet Union was dissolved and much of Eastern Europe was gradually reintegrated into the international community. And in Russia, music remains a vehicle for political opinion. Punk rockers Pussy Riot are among Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most vocal and visible opponents.

'We will have another cultural revolution': Ukrainian artists respond to Russian invasion

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova was among three of the band members convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” and sentenced to prison time following a performance at Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in 2012.

On cancelling their appearance at Park Live, Placebo’s official statement read: “We stand firmly against the atrocious war currently waged against Ukraine”.

At the time of writing, Park Live is still scheduled to take place with a number of top-end rock acts remaining on the bill.

Could Putin actually fall?

What history teaches us about how autocrats lose power — and how Putin might hang on.

By Zack Beauchamp@zackbeauchampzack@vox.com 

 Mar 13, 2022, 

Christina Animashaun/Vox


As Russia’s war in Ukraine looks increasingly disastrous, speculation has mounted that President Vladimir Putin’s misstep could prove to be his downfall. A litany of pundits and experts have predicted that frustration with the war’s costs and crushing economic sanctions could lead to the collapse of his regime.

“Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine will result in the downfall of him and his friends,” David Rothkopf declared in the Daily Beast. “If history is any guide, his overreach and his miscalculations, his weaknesses as a strategist, and the flaws in his character will undo him.”

But what events could actually bring down Putin? And how likely might they be in the foreseeable future?

The best research on how authoritarians fall points to two possible scenarios: a military coup or a popular uprising. During the Cold War, coups were the more common way for dictators to be forced out of office — think the toppling of Argentina’s Juan Perón in 1955. But since the 1990s, there has been a shift in the way that authoritarians are removed. Coups have been on the decline while popular revolts, like the Arab Spring uprisings and “color revolutions” in the former Soviet Union, have been on the rise.

For all the speculation about Putin losing power, neither of these eventualities seems particularly likely in Russia — even after the disastrous initial invasion of Ukraine. This is in no small part because Putin has done about as good a job preparing for them as any dictator could.

Over the past two decades, the Russian leader and his allies have structured nearly every core element of the Russian state with an eye toward limiting threats to the regime. Putin has arrested or killed leading dissidents, instilled fear in the general public, and made the country’s leadership class dependent on his goodwill for their continued prosperity. His ability to rapidly ramp up repression during the current crisis in response to antiwar protests — using tactics ranging from mass arrests at protests to shutting down opposition media to cutting off social media platforms — is a demonstration of the regime’s strengths.

“Putin has prepared for this eventuality for a long time, and has taken a lot of concerted actions to make sure he’s not vulnerable,” says Adam Casey, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan who studies the history of coups in Russia and the former communist bloc.

Yet at the same time, scholars of authoritarianism and Russian politics are not fully ready to rule out Putin’s fall. Unlikely is not impossible; the experts I spoke with generally believe the Ukraine invasion to have been a strategic blunder that raised the risks of both a coup and a revolution, even if their probability remains low in absolute terms.

“Before [the war], the risk from either of those threats was close to zero. And now the risk in both of those respects is certainly higher,” says Brian Taylor, a professor at Syracuse University and author of The Code of Putinism.

Ukrainians and their Western sympathizers cannot bank on Putin’s downfall. But if the war proves even more disastrous for Russia’s president than it already seems, history tells us there are pathways for even the most entrenched autocrats to lose their grip on power.

Christina Animashaun/Vox

Could the Ukraine war could cause a military coup?

In a recent appearance on Fox News, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) hit upon what he saw as a solution to the Ukraine war — for someone, perhaps “in the Russian military,” to remove Vladimir Putin by assassination or a coup. “The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out,” the senator argued.

He shouldn’t get his hopes up. A military revolt against Putin is more possible now than it was before the invasion of Ukraine, but the odds against it remain long.

Naunihal Singh is one of the world’s leading scholars of military coups. His 2017 book Seizing Power uses statistical analysis, game theory, and historical case studies to try to figure out what causes coups and what makes them likely to succeed.

Singh finds that militaries are most likely to attempt coups in low-income countries, regimes that are neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic, and nations where coups have recently happened. None of these conditions apply very well to modern Russia, a firmly authoritarian middle-income country that hasn’t seen a coup attempt since the early ’90s.

But at the same time, wars like Putin’s can breed resentment and fear in the ranks, precisely the conditions under which we’ve seen coups in other countries. “There are reasons why Putin might be increasingly concerned here,” Singh says, pointing to coups in Mali in 2012 and Burkina Faso earlier this year as precedent. Indeed, a 2017 study of civil wars found that coups are more likely to happen during conflicts when governments face stronger opponents — suggesting that wartime deaths and defeat really do raise the odds of military mutinies.

In Singh’s view, the Ukraine conflict raises the odds of a coup in Russia for two reasons: It could weaken the military leadership’s allegiance to Putin, and it could provide an unusual opportunity to plan a move against him.

The motive for Russian officers to launch a coup would be fairly straightforward: The costly Ukraine campaign becomes unpopular among, and even personally threatening to, key members of the military.

Leading Russian journalists and experts have warned that Putin is surrounded by a shrinking bubble of hawkish yes-men who feed his nationalist obsessions and tell him only what he wants to hear. This very small group drew up an invasion plan that assumed the Ukrainian military would put up minimal resistance, allowing Russia to rapidly seize Kyiv and install a puppet regime.

This plan both underestimated Ukraine’s resolve and overestimated the competence of the Russian military, leading to significant Russian casualties and a failed early push toward the Ukrainian capital. Since then, Russian forces have been bogged down in a slow and costly conflict defined by horrific bombardments of populated areas. International sanctions have been far harsher than the Kremlin expected, sending the Russian economy into a tailspin and specifically punishing its elite’s ability to engage in commerce abroad.

According to Farida Rustamova, a Russian reporter well-sourced in the Kremlin, high-ranking civilian officials in the Russian government are already unhappy about the war and its economic consequences. One can only imagine the sentiment among military officers, few of whom appear to have been informed of the war plans beforehand — and many of whom are now tasked with killing Ukrainians en masse.

Layered on top of that is something that often can precipitate coups: personal insecurity among high-ranking generals and intelligence officers. According to Andrei Soldatov, a Russia expert at the Center for European Policy Analysis think tank, Putin is punishing high-ranking officials in the FSB — the successor agency to the KGB — for the war’s early failures. Soldatov’s sources say that Putin has placed Sergei Beseda, the leader of the FSB’s foreign intelligence branch, under house arrest (as well as his deputy).

Reports like this are hard to verify. But they track with Singh’s predictions that poor performance in wars generally leads autocrats to find someone to blame — and that fear of punishment could convince some among Russia’s security elite that the best way to protect themselves is to get rid of Putin.

Rosgvardiya (Russian National Guard) servicemen detain a demonstrator during a protest in Moscow against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24. 

Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images

“I don’t think Putin will assassinate them, but they may still have to live in fear and humiliation,” Singh says. “They’ll be afraid for their own futures.”

The conflict also provides disgruntled officials with an opening. In authoritarian countries like Russia, generals don’t always have many opportunities to speak with one another without fear of surveillance or informants. Wars change that, at least somewhat.

There are now “lots of good reasons for generals to be in a room with key players and even to evade surveillance by the state, since they will want to evade NATO and US surveillance,” Singh explains.

That said, coups are famously difficult to pull off. And the Russian security state in particular is organized around a frustrating one.

Contrary to most people’s expectations, successful military coups are generally pretty bloodless; smart plotters typically don’t launch if they believe there’s a real chance it’ll come down to a gun battle in the presidential palace. Instead, they ensure they have overwhelming support from the armed forces in the capital — or at least can convince everyone that they do — before they make their move.

And on that front, Russia experts say Putin has done a bang-up job of what political scientists call “coup-proofing” his government. He has seeded the military with counterintelligence officers, making it hard for potential mutineers to know whom to trust. He has delegated primary responsibility for repression at home to security agencies other than the regular military, which both physically distances troops from Moscow and reduces an incentive to rebel (orders to kill one’s own people being quite unpopular in the ranks).

He has also intensified the coup coordination problem by splitting up the state security services into different groups led by trusted allies. In 2016, Putin created the Russian National Guard — also called the Rosgvardiya — as an entity separate from the military. Under the command of thuggish Putin loyalist Viktor Zolotov, it performs internal security tasks like border security and counterterrorism in conjunction with Russia’s intelligence services.

These services are split into four federal branches. Three of these — the FSB, GRU, and SVR — have their own elite special operations forces. The fourth, the Federal Protection Services, is Russia’s Secret Service equivalent with a twist: It has in the range of 20,000 officers, according to a 2013 estimate. By contrast, the Secret Service has about 4,500, in a country with a population roughly three times Russia’s. This allows the Federal Protection Services to function as a kind of Praetorian Guard that can protect Putin from assassins and coups alike.

The result is that the regular military, the most powerful of Russia’s armed factions, does not necessarily dominate Russia’s internal security landscape. Any successful plot would likely require complex coordination among members of different agencies who may not know each other well or trust each other very much. In a government known to be shot through with potential informers, that’s a powerful disincentive against a coup.

“The coordination dilemma ... is especially severe when you have multiple different intelligence agencies and ways of monitoring the military effectively, which the Russians do,” Casey explains. “There’s just a lot of different failsafe measures that Putin has built over the years that are oriented toward preventing a coup.”

Christina Animashaun/Vox

Dreams of a Russian uprising — but can it happen?

In an interview on the New York Times’s Sway podcast, former FBI special agent Clint Watts warned of casualties in the Ukraine war leading to another Russian revolution.

“The mothers in Russia have always been the pushback against Putin during these conflicts. This is going to be next-level scale,” he argued. “We’re worried about Kyiv falling today. I’m worried about Moscow falling between day 30 and six months from now.”

A revolution against Putin has become likelier since the war began; in fact, it’s probably more plausible than a coup. In the 21st century, we have seen more popular uprisings in post-Soviet countries — like Georgia, Belarus, and Ukraine itself — than we have coups. Despite that, the best evidence suggests the odds of one erupting in Russia are still fairly low.

Few scholars are more influential in this field than Harvard’s Erica Chenoweth. Their finding, in work with fellow political scientist Maria Stephan, that nonviolent protest is more likely to topple regimes than an armed uprising is one of the rare political science claims to have transcended academia, becoming a staple of op-eds and activist rhetoric.

When Chenoweth looks at the situation in Russia today, they note that the longstanding appearance of stability in Putin’s Russia might be deceiving.

“Russia has a long and storied legacy of civil resistance [movements],” Chenoweth tells me. “Unpopular wars have precipitated two of them.”

Here, Chenoweth is referring to two early-20th-century uprisings against the czars: the 1905 uprising that led to the creation of the Duma, Russia’s legislature; and the more famous 1917 revolution that gave us the Soviet Union. Both events were triggered in significant part by Russian wartime losses (in the Russo-Japanese War and World War I, respectively). And indeed, we have seen notable dissent already during the current conflict, including demonstrations in nearly 70 Russian cities on March 6 alone.

It’s conceivable that these protests grow if the war continues to go poorly, especially if it produces significant Russian casualties, clear evidence of mass atrocities against civilians, and continued deep economic pain from sanctions. But we are still very far from a mass uprising.

Chenoweth’s research suggests you need to get about 3.5 percent of the population involved in protests to guarantee some kind of government concession. In Russia, that translates to about 5 million people. The antiwar protests haven’t reached anything even close to that scale, and Chenoweth is not willing to predict that it’s likely for them to approach it.

“It is hard to organize sustained collective protest in Russia,” they note. “Putin’s government has criminalized many forms of protests, and has shut down or restricted the activities of groups, movements, and media outlets perceived to be in opposition or associated with the West.”

Protesters clash with police in Independence Square in Kyiv on February 20, 2014. Demonstrators were calling for the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych over corruption and an abandoned trade agreement with the EU. 

Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

A mass revolution, like a coup, is something that Putin has been preparing to confront for years. By some accounts, it has been his number one fear since the Arab Spring and especially the 2013 Euromaidan uprising in Ukraine. The repressive barriers Chenoweth points out are significant, making it unlikely — though, again, not impossible — that the antiwar protests evolve into a movement that topples Putin, even during a time of heightened stress for the regime.

In an authoritarian society like Russia, the government’s willingness to arrest, torture, and kill dissidents creates a similar coordination problem as the one coup plotters experience —just on a grander scale. Instead of needing to get a small cabal of military and intelligence officers to risk death, leaders need to convince thousands of ordinary citizens to do the same.

In past revolutions, opposition-controlled media outlets and social media platforms have helped solve this difficulty. But during the war, Putin has shut down notable independent media outlets and cracked down on social media, restricting Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram access. He has also introduced emergency measures that punish the spread of “fake” information about the war by up to 15 years in jail, leading even international media outlets like the New York Times to pull their local staff. Antiwar protesters have been arrested en masse.

Most Russians get their news from government-run media, which have been serving up a steady diet of pro-war propaganda. Many of them appear to genuinely believe it: An independent opinion poll found that 58 percent of Russians supported the war to at least some degree.

“What these polls reflect is how many people actually tune in to state media, which tells them what to think and what to say,” Russian journalist Alexey Kovalyov tells my colleague Sean Illing.

The brave protesters in Russian cities prove that the government grip on the information environment isn’t airtight. But for this dissent to evolve into something bigger, Russian activists will need to figure out a broader way to get around censorship, government agitprop, and repression. That’s not easy to do, and requires skilled activists. Chenoweth’s research, and the literature on civil resistance more broadly, finds that the tactical choices of opposition activists have a tremendous impact on whether the protesters ultimately succeed in their aims.

Organizers need to “give people a range of tactics they can participate in, because not everyone is going to want to protest given the circumstances. But people may be willing to boycott or do other things that appear to have lower risk but still have a significant impact, ” says Hardy Merriman, a senior advisor to the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.

You can already see some tactical creativity at work. Alexis Lerner, a scholar of dissent in Russia at the US Naval Academy, tells me that Russians are using unconventional methods like graffiti and TikTok videos to get around the state’s censorship and coercive apparatus. She also notes that an unusual amount of criticism of the government has come from high-profile Russians, ranging from oligarchs to social media stars.

But at the same time, you can also see the effect of the past decades of repression at work. During his time in power, Putin has systematically worked to marginalize and repress anyone he identifies as a potential threat. At the highest level, this means attacking and imprisoning prominent dissenters like Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Alexei Navalny.

Opposition supporters attend an unauthorized anti-Putin rally called by opposition leader Alexei Navalny in St. Petersburg, Russia, on May 5, 2018, two days ahead of Vladimir Putin’s inauguration for a fourth Kremlin term. 

Olga Maltseva/AFP via Getty Images

But the repression also extends down the social food chain, from journalists to activists on down to ordinary Russians who may have dabbled too much in politics. The result is that anti-Putin forces are extremely depleted, with many Putin opponents operating in exile even before the Ukraine conflict began.

Moreover, revolutions don’t generally succeed without elite action. The prototypical success of a revolutionary protest movement is not the storming of the Bastille but the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. In that case, Mubarak’s security forces refused to repress the protesters and pressured him to resign as they continued.

“Symbolic protest is usually not enough to bring about change,” Chenoweth explains. “What makes such movements succeed is the ability to create, facilitate, or precipitate shifts in the loyalty of the pillars of support, including military and security elites, state media, oligarchs, and Putin’s inner circle of political associates.”

Given the Russian president’s level of control over his security establishment, it will take a truly massive protest movement to wedge them apart.
What are the odds of regime change in Russia?

It can be difficult to talk about low-probability events like the collapse of the Putin regime. Suggesting that it’s possible can come across as suggesting it’s likely; suggesting it’s unlikely can come across as suggesting it’s impossible.

But it’s important to see a gray area here: accepting that Putin’s end is more likely than it was on February 23, the day before Russia launched its offensive, but still significantly less likely than his government continuing to muddle through. The war has put new pressure on the regime, at both the elite and the mass public level, but the fact remains that Putin’s Russia is an extremely effective autocracy with strong guardrails against coups and revolutions.

So how should we think about the odds? Is it closer to 20 percent — or 1 percent?

This kind of question is impossible to answer with anything like precision. The information environment is so murky, due to both Russian censorship and the fog of war, that it’s difficult to discern basic facts like the actual number of Russian war dead. We don’t really have a good sense of how key members of the Russian security establishment are feeling about the war or whether the people trying to organize mass protests are talented enough to get around aggressive repression.

And the near-future effects of key policies are similarly unclear. Take international sanctions. We know that these measures have had a devastating effect on the Russian economy. What we don’t know is who the Russian public will blame for their immiseration: Putin for launching the war — or America and its allies for imposing the sanctions? Can reality pierce through Putin’s control of the information environment? The answers to these questions will make a huge difference.

Putin built his legitimacy around the idea of restoring Russia’s stability, prosperity, and global standing. By threatening all three, the war in Ukraine is shaping up to be the greatest test of his regime to date.