Putin’s Two Critical Mistakes Threaten His Future and Russia’s, Inozemtsev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 30 – Over the last month, Vladimir Putin typically a master tactician has made two critically important strategic missteps which threaten his own future and that of the Russian Federation, according to Russian economic and political analyst Vladislav Inozemtsev (t.me/kremlebezBashennik/12755).

            “On the one hand,” he writes, “Putin has begun to set up new ‘centers of power’” that not only undermine existing ones but fight among themselves.  “And on the other, the president has completely lost a sense of reality in regard tot his country as shown by his series of interviews to TASS and with the outside world by giving way to Sechin on existing the deal with OPEC.”

            As a result, Putin must now deal with a country that is not administered very well, “in which all laws have been annulled and which in support of this, Kremlin propaganda has begun to frighten people with perspectives of the plague and of economic collapse as a result of the total inability of the entire ‘vertical’ to organize to help the population and business.”

            The country has entered into a period of permanent emergency, Inozemtsev continues. But “regardless of what takes place in the coming days, no one will be dealing with economics or medicine,” what Russia needs most, but rather with politics and reactions to how the new centers will divide power among themselves and how the regions “will close themselves off.”

            Most likely, the economist says, most Russians will find themselves driven into their apartments, “but in the very nearest future, Russia may face the Italian variant in a more dramatic sense” in terms of both the spread of the infection and the impact of the coronavirus on its economy.

            Very soon, “millions of honest Russians may become disappointed in how the elite has divided power” given how little it has done for them and even conclude that the powers that be are behaving in ways that make supporting them for much longer insupportable, Inozemtsev suggests.

            “War (even with a virus) and the loss of the means of existence are factors” which Russia has faced before and which Vasily Rozanov observed in his 1918 essay, Apocalypse of Our Time, can lead to its disappearance.

            Inozemtsev says that he hopes his fears are not realized but adds that he can’t escape from the sense that “January 15, 2020 is playing in the fate of a Russia that has ‘risen from its knees’ the very same role which July 31, 1914, the declaration of general mobilization played for its predecessors in power.”