Putin’s ‘Special Military Operation’ 'Saving Russia' from NATO Attack, Matviyenko Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 22 – Given the centrality of World War II in Russian propaganda after Putin launched his expanded war in Ukraine, it is no surprise that some senior Moscow official would argue that perhaps the best reason for supporting Putin’s war is that it is saving Russia from an attack by NATO and the West.

            Valentina Matviyenko, the chairman of the upper chamber of the Russian legislature, has now done that on the 85^th anniversary of the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 (council.gov.ru/services/discussions/blogs/175570/ reposted among other places at ehorussia.com/new/node/34779).

            According to her, after the Euromaidan in Ukraine led to a change in the political orientation in Kyiv, the West “assigned” that country to be “the springboard for a new campaign by the West against Russia,” something that meant Moscow had “no other way to ensure Russia’s security than by the special military operation.”

            Even now, more than four years later and with the war continuing, Matviyenko says, “only the achievement of the goals of the SVO will completely remove the threat of a global war.” Given how elastic Moscow has defined those “goals,” it is not entirely clear just which ones have to be achieved at least as far as Matviyenko and Putin think.

            But the parliamentarian’s words are likely to lead somw to draw another parallel with the period immediately preceding the German invasion, the time when Stalin launched his winter war against Finland, a conflict that even though it did not lead to a complete Russian defeat nonetheless highlighted the weakness of the Red Army and likely encouraged Hitler.

            That opponents of the Russian Federation today might read anything less than a total victory in the same way and exploit the situation in some way likely explains why Putin will keep fighting. After all, as long as he does, he can be sure that many Russians and some in the West can be counted on to assume that a Russian victory is just around the corner.  

New Putin-Backed Measure Makes It Easier to Add or More Likely Remove Nations from List of Indigenous Peoples

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 25 – The Duma is set to pass a government-backed measure that will make it easier for Moscow to add or remove nations from the list of numerically small peoples who currently receive special benefits. The bill does so by shifting responsibility for the inclusion on this list from the center to the regions.

            Up to now, numerically small peoples of the North and Far East were listed by Moscow if they numbered fewer than 50,000 residents each and if they engaged in traditional ways of economic activity, but the Kremlin says that those standards are insufficient and wants both regions and the Academy of Sciences to have a voice in the matter.

            As a result, this new measure drafted at the direction of Vladimir Putin says that it will fix the bases for membership more precisely and the sources of expertise that are to be used for making such decisions (nazaccent.ru/content/45626-v-gosdume-podderzhali-pravitelstvennyj-zakonoproekt-o-korennyh-narodah/).

            That might seem to be a positive development but in fact it is likely to have just the opposite effect. That is because the regions which will likely bear most of the costs will have now have a special voice and decisions will be taken not in forums where all indigenous people are likely to focus on a decision but in single regions regarding single groups.

            That conclusion is suggested by the fact that the Duma nationalities committee while recommending that this bill be approved by the Duma as a whole sent back for revision a bill calling for the formation of a system of regional councils of representatives of the numerically small indigenous peoples, almost certainly killing the measure for the foreseeable future.

Baku to Line Karabakh Canal and Other Waterways with Concrete to Reduce Water Losses

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 22 – The loss of available water supplies as a result of global warming and the reduction of the inflow of water from trans-border rivers has prompted Azerbaijan to address a problem that plagues many other countries in the former Soviet space but that they have done far less to address.

            That is the loss of water from canals and other water networks because the former are not paved and the latter are old and leak, something that not only costs Azerbaijan as much as 38 percent of the water it should have and ruins land under and adjoining the canals which in some cases turns into swamps.

            For more than two years, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has called for paving the major canals in his country; and now, with financing lined up and project planning close to completion, that project is now slated to begin in earnest (caspianpost.com/analytics/how-azerbaijan-is-losing-water).

            The centerpiece of this effort is  the Karabakh Irrigation Canal, one of Azerbaijan’s longest and most important as it extends more than 170 kilometers and provides water to 115,000 hectares of agricultural land and people in nine districts in the western portion of that country.

            According to Baku analysts, this canal, most of whose route is unlined, currently loses roughly 300 million cubic meters of water, something that restricts agricultural production in two ways: it limits the among of irrigation that is possible and it destroys agricultural land near the canal’s path.

            Baku officials say that their country is losing 38.6 percent of the water it needs from loss of water in the canals and irrigation systems across the country. That is almost twice the amount lost in EU countries where most canals and lined with concrete and irrigation systems are far more modern.

            They say that within ten years, the lining of canals and the installation of better irrigation systems will reduce the loss of water from that current figure to 20 percent and by 2050 to 10 percent. If that happens, Azerbaijan will be able to achieve water security almost regardless of what happens with global warming or the reduction of river flows.

Moscow’s Compatriots Program Unintentionally Leading to Formation and Growth of Ethnic Enclaves in Russian Federation

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 21 – Twenty years ago this month, Putin established a program for the resettlement of ethnic Russians and other Russian speakers in the Russian Federation. As a result, 1.2 million people have arrived, but many aren’t ethnic Russians – and they are now contributing to the rise of ethnic enclaves, critics of the program say.

            The program was adopted in 2006 in order to compensate for the demographic decline of ethnic Russians in the first decade of this century after the relatively large-scal returns of ethnic Russians from the former Soviet space had ended in the decade before  (ritmeurasia.ru/news--2026-06-21--20-let-programme-pereselenija-sootechestvennikov-naskolko-ona-okazalas-effektivnoj-88501).

            But it has not worked entirely as intended, Rhythm of Eurasia says. The overwhelming majority of ethnic Russians who lived in the other Soviet republics in 1989 still live in what are now independent countries, and Moscow’s efforts to have them specifically return have been far less successful in percentage terms than have Astana’s to facilitate the return of ethnic Kazakhs.

            Most of the returnees are from five republics of the former USSR, the portal says, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Armenia. The inclusion of Tajikistan and Armenia on this list highlights something Moscow prefers to ignore: a large share of the compatriots returning to Russia aren’t ethnic Russians.

            There were only 68,200 ethnic Russians in Tajikistan in 2000 and only 14,600 ethnic Russians in Armenia in 2001. Consequently, “the intake from these countries could only occur through the participation of representatives of their titular ethnoses,” Tajiks and Armenians, something that has led to the appearance of growth of enclaves in Russia.

            Equally serious is the fact that the compatriots program which has been promoted as a way to increase the share of ethnic Russians in the Russian Federation population or at least limit the decline of this metric is not having the intended effect but instead is contributing on its own to the mounting migration crisis there. 

Northern Sea Route Development Experiencing Delays and Cost Overruns Because of Shortages of Skilled Workers and Attempts to Attract Them with High Salaries

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 21 – Russia’s much-ballyhooed Northern Sea Route is currently facing serious shortages of skilled workers needed to complete development projects on land. To try to attract more workers, companies are increasing the salaries they are prepared to pay; but that is creating another problem: pushing up costs at a time of budgetary stringency.

            According to Maksim Maksimov, an expert consultant for the Russian North television channel based in Vologda, shortages of personnel is “one of the key systemic problems in the development of the Norther Sea Route” and one that the project has not been able to overcome (caspian.land/37380-severnomu-morskomu-puti-nuzhny-kvalificirovannye-kadry.html).

            Attempts by the companies involved to lure specialists from other places by offering high salaries has created another problem: the costs of these projects increase dramatically, something that makes them targets for cutbacks by a government that is facing budgetary restrictions due to the growing costs of Putin’s expanded war in Ukraine.

            Consequently, higher salaries are at best a stopgap and may end by forcing Moscow to cancel projects because they have become too expensive to finance at the present time. 

Popularity of Conspiracy Theories about Demise of USSR Intended to Distract Attention from Real Causes, Tsipko Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 22 – Conspiracy theories about the demise of the USSR, associated in the first instance with publicist Yevgeny Spitsyn, are intended to distract attention from the real causes of that event – the way Lenin reassembled the empire after 1918, the way Stalin repressed the population, and the way Russian nationalism undermined the USSR, Aleksandr Tsipko says.

            In a 5,000-word article in which he details the numerous mistakes and misinterpretations Spitsyn and his ilk make, the senior Russian social scientist and commentator makes a large number of points based on his reading of history and on his own experience near the center of power in Gorbachev’s time (ng.ru/ideas/2026-06-22/6_9521_ussr.html).

            But his arguments about the real reasons for the disintegration of the USSR in 1991 are especially important, particularly because all three of them are not only ignored by the conspiracy theorists but also are at odds with the ideological pronouncements of Putin and supporters of his regime.

            First, Tsipko says, one must keep in mind that Russia was reassembled by Lenin in 1918-1921 not as a voluntary union of republics but by military force. It was never the free union of peoples that Soviet leaders insisted and that Putin and company continue to insist existed. Consequently, when the center weakened, the country Lenin established began to fall apart.

            Second, he continues, Stalin was never the hero for most Soviets. Instead,  he was recognized as a brutal dictator from which not only the population of the USSR wanted to escape but also from which the leaders of the CPSU wanted to do as well. Any attempt to restore Stalinism, therefore, will only increase opposition and fissiparousness as it did in 1991.

            And third – and this is Tsipko’s key point, one especially important because it is typically ignored – the USSR “was destroyed in 1991 above all by the ethnic Russians and became a victim of Great Russian separatism” (stress supplied), with Boris Yeltsin playing the key role but others like Aleksandr Yakovlev who earlier warned about this doing so as well.

            According to Tsipko, it was Yeltsin’s drive in 1990 to have the RSFSR declare its laws rather than those of the USSR dominant on its territory that was the proximate cause of the demise of the Soviet state; but it was efforts by Yakovlev and others to boost the study of pre-revolutionary Russia that also contributed to the USSR’s collapse.

            The senior Russian commentator says “we must always bear in mind what Nicholas Berdyaev said about the mystery of Russianness,” specifically his argument that the Russian people made great sacrifices to create the Russian state … but remained without power over their own vast realm.”

            “Imperialism, in the Western and bourgeois sense of the word, is alien to the Russian people and yet they have submissively devoted their energies to building an imperialism in which they were not committed or beneficiaries. Herein,” Berdyaev wrote, “lies the mystery of Russian history and the Russian soul.            “

Kremlin will Use Indebtedness of Russia’s Federal Subjects to Impose Even Tighter Central Control, Economist Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 20 – The increasingly hard-pressed federal subjects of the Russian Federation are now forced to cut costs, but because of the absence of any law allowing them to go bankrupt, Moscow will ultimately have to bail them out, although such aid will come at the price of what is left of their autonomy, economist Dmitry Nekrasov says.

            Nekrasov, who now lives abroad and is part of the CASE network, says “the painful reduction in various expenditures at the regional level will continue, but on the other hand, it is clear that Moscow will intervene to solve these issues” (svoboda.org/a/bednye-stanut-bednee/33785267.html).

            Russia “doesn’t have a procedure for regional bankruptcies” and so when regional governments get in debt over their ability to cope, Moscow will have to take action – but that action will come at a high price in the ability of the regions involved to take any decisions on their own.

            Nekrasov suggests that this situation is “rather similar to what happened to Greece in the EU during the debt crisis” 15 years ago. The EU refused to allow Greece to default and provided  funds to ensure that that wouldn’t happen, but this money was given only on condition of “severe reductions” in Greek spending, something that infuriated Greeks and created other problems.

            The economist does not address the most extreme step Moscow might take: the amalgamation of the hardest hit regions with those doing somewhat better. Putin has long wanted to reduce the number of federal subjects; and the debt crisis in the federal subjects could very easily become the trigger to restore that process.