Putin’s Deadly Healthcare Optimization Sparking Protests in Russian North

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 22 – Vladimir Putin’s healthcare optimization program is not only reducing the number of medical facilities and personnel in much of the country and sending mortality rates up there but also cutting the quality of those who remain because Moscow is inserting loyalists in place of experts, a practice that is sparking protests in the Russian north.

            Evidence of all this is to be found in Arkhangelsk Oblast, Lukas Zhalalis of the Okno portal says. In Kotlas, he points out, the number of doctors and nurses has been cut back to the point that few can see a specialist and the doctor who had been in charge for many years was replaced by an inexperienced Putin loyalist (okno.group/midicina-arh/).

            These developments, local residents say, have reduced healthcare there to what it was in the 19^th century. But perhaps more important, it has sparked protests by local residents whose relatives have been dying and who themselves are now at risk of premature death as well (vk.com/yarenskchist?w=wall-170660931_18074).

            Because these protests are small and even more because they are taking place in locations far from Moscow or from ethnic regions which typically have more developed online reporting, they have been largely ignored. But this pattern is critically important because it highlights two things that are often given less attention than they deserve.

            On the one hand, Russians are quite prepared to protest about developments that they see as having a direct impact on their lives, even if they do not take to the streets to demonstrate against Kremlin policies like the war in Ukraine because they do not see that they have any chance of changing such “political” things.

            And on the other, they suggest that as Putin pulls more money out of healthcare and other fields to finance his wars, he will trigger more Russians to protest this latest threat to their survival and may eventually lead some of them to connect the dots and see that the Putin regime itself constitutes a threat to their survival and thus is something they should be protesting against.