Even War in Ukraine for Putin is a Means to the End of His Not Being Succeeded by Someone who will Pursue ‘De-Putinization,’ Gallyamov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 19 – Vladimir Putin’s “super task” is to be succeeded by someone who will continue to rule in his name as Stalin did after the death of Lenin rather than by someone who will turn away from his system and move in new directions as Khrushchev did after the death of Stalin, Gallyamov says.

            The former Putin speechwriter who is now a prominent Putin critic insists that even the current Kremlin leader’s expanded war in Ukraine is a means to that end rather than having the independent and all-important quality for him that is often suggested (t.me/abbasgallyamovpolitics/10989 reposted at echofm.online/opinions/glavnaya-czel-putina-putin-posle-putina).

            This reflects the fact, Gallyamov says, that “Putin is a president of the status quo, not of revisionism. He has no ideals for which he would be willing to take serious risks. Of course, he does not want to appear a cynical egoist, so he likes to throw dust in people's eyes by feigning high aspirations and values … but this is nothing more than a show.”

            The current Kremlin leader “is a revisionist,” he continues, “precisely because he is a guardian of the status quo on the inside. He may redraw borders, dismantled the international order and start wars; but his ultimate political aim is conservative: ensuring that power remains exactly where it now lies.”

            Indeed, “even posthumous greatness is something Putin needs primarily as an insurance policy. In his view, a good successor is not someone who will build an even greater Russia, but someone whose own political survival depends on preserving the Putin pantheon, the Putin elite, and the Putin version of history.”

Russian Banks Require Those Applying for Home Mortgages to Have Insurance against Drone Attacks

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 19 – Putin may think that drone attacks aren’t causing all that serious damage on Russia, but Russian banks don’t share that view and are requiring those seeking mortgages for housing in so-called “vulnerable” regions have insurance covering the damage Ukrainian drones have been inflicting.

            According to Kommersant, major banks are now checking to see that the insurance borrowers have or plan to take out includes coverage of damages from drones and their parts (kommersant.ru/doc/8847161 reposted at echofm.online/news/rossijskie-banki-stali-trebovat-strahovat-ipotechnoe-zhilyo-ot-atak-bpla).

            Policies including such coverage cost from ten to 20 percent more than those which don’t, the paper says; but if borrowers don’t have this kind of coverage, the banks are increasing the interest rate on loans they extend by between  0.5 and 2.0 percent or even “refusing” to agree to offer a mortgage at all.

            Such actions by banks are likely a better indication of just how much Ukrainian drone attacks have brought the war home to Russia and how long those with money on the table think how long these attacks will extend into the future than are any upbeat comments by the Kremlin leader to the contrary. 

Putin has Failed to Learn What Jaruzelski Did: Repression Can Win a Battle but It Can’t Win a War, Gallyamov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 18 – In 1989, Polish leader Wojciech Jaruzelski warned Hungary against introducing martial law because of his own experience in doing so. “Yes, we did it and won the battle by crushing Solidarity but as a result we lost the war” to main the legitimacy of the government.

            That is a lesson Vladimir Putin should be learning but does not yet appear to have done so according to Abbas Gallyamov, a former Putin speechwriter who is now a critic of the Kremlin leader, and the results for his regime are likely to be disastrous as a result (pointmedia.io/story/6a84340f75d0d3346a25cb77).

            According to Gallyamov, Jaruzelski discovered that by imposing martial law he was able to shut down the Solidarity movement, but only at the cost of “destroying a significant part of the legitimacy of the communist authorities. Before the Polish general imposed martial law, Solidarity might have been integrated into “some kind of reformed socialism” but not after.

            Once he had crushed Solidarity, the Polish general eventually recognized, he faced a country in which “millions of Poles viewed power as something kept in place exclusively by force.” Even more he learned that while “the absence of protest” first looked like “a lack of discontent,” it soon became obvious that “it was not the same thing.”

            “Using mass repression,” Gallyamov continues, “Putin managed to solve the same problem that Jaruzelsky once faced: to defeat the structures of the opposition and remove the protest from the streets. He won the battle. But the question now is whether the Kremlin leader is losing a similar war as a result.”

            What everyone must understand, the commentator says, is that “repression  destroys not so much discontent as the opportunity to demonstrate it.” And as a result, “the need to continually resort to coercion undermines previous formulas of legitimacy: it is increasingly difficult to assert that the government rules because society voluntarily supports it.”

            That is what is happening to Putin. He started by claiming that he represented the people by means of democracy but then he proposed another basis for the population to support him: patriotism. “Even if we aren’t democrats,” the Putinists claimed, “we are defending Russia” and “protecting the motherland.”

            But now that Ukrainian drones are hitting Russian cities, Gallyamov says, it is ever more difficult for the Kremlin “to explain what exactly the ability to ensure the security of the country gives the current regime the right to demand unconditional subordination” among the population of the Russian Federation.

            That has left Putin in “a very unpleasant situation.” He destroyed his claim to democratic legitimacy by repression, and his efforts to invoke patriotism as an alternative basis are failing given the inability of his regime “to ensure the very security the population was offered in order to get it to sacrifice its political freedoms.”

            As a result, Gallyamov concludes, now, “Russia has absolutely no need for Putin from any perspective whatsoever, whether democratic or even ‘patriotic,’” a lesson Jaruzelski learned albeit too late to save himself and his regime.  Whether Putin will have better luck very much remains to be seen.

Moscow Warns Regions Any Use of Ethnic or Religious Issues in Elections is ‘Impermissible’

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 19 – Moscow’s Federal Agency for Nationality Affairs (FADN) has sent a memo to all federal subjects reminding them that any use of ethnicity or religion in election campaigns is “not permissible” and that they can use a variety of provisions in Russian law against any individual, group or party that violates that principle.

            According to the Nazaccent portal, the document specifies that it is impermissible “to call for voting for or against a candidate solely on the basis of nationality or make public statements about the inadmissibility of the participation of certain candidates on the basis of their ethnicity or religious affiliation (nazaccent.ru/content/45843-v-fadn-rf-napomnili-o-nedopustimosti/).

            For such actions, which the memorandum that has been distributed in the form of a brochure says are a form of illegal “incitement of hatred” on these grounds, Russian law establishes administrative and criminal liability up to fines of 600,000 rubles, forced labor for up to five years, and imprisonment for as long as six years.

            Russian commentators have frequently suggested that one of the aspects of elections that Kremlin officials are most concerned about is the possibility that candidates or parties will use them to exacerbate tensions between members of Russia’s various religious and ethnic communities.

            But the Moscow authorities have always been careful about how they talk about this possibility given that any such commentaries may have the effect of leading some groups not to avoid using ethnic or religious appeals but rather making it more likely that they will do so by suggesting a strategy such political activists may not have considered.

            This time around, in advance of the September 26 Duma elections, Moscow has limited its declarations on this point to this single FADN memorandum, an indication that the Russian leadership is worried about both the possibility that ethnic and religious issues will be raised and the certainty that any discussion of that possibility could further exacerbate the situation.

Moscow Now Forced to Launch Coordinated Attacks on Ethnic Minorities Lest Those Attacked First Warn Others

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 17 – Last December, Russian security officers carried out coordinated raids against activists of the numerically small indigenous peoples of the Russian Federation, a reflection of Moscow’s continuing crackdown on non-Russians but an event that highlights a new development especially worrisome to the Kremlin.

            “The timing was deliberate,” Anastasia Anisimova says, because “by starting at exactly the same moment, investigators ensured that he activists could not warn one another or coordinate a response” (correctiv.org/en/latest-stories/international-en/2026/08/17/terrorizing-the-indigenous-russian-repression-against-its-own-nations/ summarized at indigenous-russia.com/archives/49684).

            While Moscow has worked hard to discredit and destroy organizations both inside the Russian Federation and abroad that keep non-Russian groups in touch with one another, it has not been able to eliminate the contacts that activists from these groups have either within Russia or abroad.

            Indeed, as this report makes clear, activists have remained able to maintain ties with one another both directly and via their colleagues who have been forced into emigration to the point that Moscow has had to take this into consideration when it launches new moves against the non-Russians.        

            That Moscow now has to do that gives the non-Russians who are able to maintain such ties greater influence than their individual numbers or even collective size within the population might suggest and likely means that the Russian force structures will increase their efforts to break these links lest they limit the Kremlin’s freedom of action in the future.

            It also means that these links deserve to be followed ever more closely and actively supported by those who study these peoples because they have become a force multiplier for these nationalities, a form of cooperation that the popular fronts of the Baltic countries pioneered at the end of Soviet times and that the Circassians and Ukraine are pushing now. 

Siberia’s Metal and Energy Production Only has Importance When and Where These are Used, Verkhoturov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 18 -- Moscow officials routinely celebrate Siberia’s metal and energy production, Dmitry Verkhoturov says; but those things acquire importance only when they are used to produce something, a pattern that was true in Soviet times when these Siberian “products” were used for military industry in the region but is less the case now.

            Metal and energy “do not mean a lot by themselves,” the commentator on economic issues in Russia east of the Urals says; “they acquire significance only in connection of their rolein the preparation of something very necessary and useful.” Increasing the output of the two without reference to that is meaningless and even counterproductive (sibmix.com/?doc=22493).

            Russian officials got used to thinking and talking in this way during Soviet times when metals and power produced in Siberia were used almost exclusively for military industries and any discussion of these industries was impossible because data about them were invariably classified, Verkhoturov continues.

            Now, however, those discussing how to develop Siberia need to talk about whether there are sufficient industries of this kind left in Siberia to justify the development of metals and energy or whether other industries should be promoted to take their place if they do not now exist, he says.

            But that isn’t happening, Verkhoturov says. Instead, Moscow officials and often those in Siberia as well are promoting the development of mining and energy production as ends in themselves without any discussion of how their output will be used or even if it makes sense to develop them east of the Urals when the need for their “products” is uncertain. 

Moscow Now Using Many Ways to Punish Lawyers who Defend Their Clients Vigorously and Make Other Attorneys Less Willing to Do So, ‘Novaya Gazeta’ Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 17 – Over the last five years, the number of Russian lawyers who have been charged with criminal offenses has risen from 80 in 2020 to 133 last year. Such charges attract much attention, but this form of attack on attorneys is only a tiny part of Moscow’s efforts to rein in lawyers and reduce their willingness to defend clients, Maria Ehrlich says.

            Although statistics are not available, the data journalist for Novaya Gazeta says, the government has also succeeded in depriving other lawyers of their licenses and extending the requirement that counsel in an ever larger range of cases have license, something that chilled the legal profession (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2026/08/17/pokushenie-na-zashchitu).

            Legal chambers, the organizations corresponding to bar associations in Western countries, have fought back; but they increasingly are losing such cases in court and some of these organizations have decided that they must defer to the government on licensing rather than risk being destroyed completely, Ehrlich says.

            In addition to these frontal attacks on the status of lawyers, attacks most common in political cases but ever more often turning up in non-political ones as well, as prosecutors seek to gain convictions more easily so as to set themselves up for promotion in the Russian justice system, she continues.

            But perhaps the largest and most insidious form of repression against lawyers is far less noticeable to the general public, although its impact on those accused of crimes and the possibility that they will get a fair trial is enormous and disturbing to anyone who hopes for justice in Russian court rooms.

            According to a 2025 survey by the Federal Chamber of Lawyers which Ehrlich cites, 72 percent of lawyers said they had been confronted by attempts to persuade them to encourage their clients to plead guilty and 53.5 percent said they had been threatened with reprisal if they actively defended the accused.