John and Sergei in Paris: No Progress on Ukraine

Secretary of State John Kerry made a last-minute diversion on his flight home from the Mid-East Saturday night for an emergency meeting with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov for crisis talks on Ukraine Sunday in Paris.  Judging from the after-meeting conference, he should have spared the trip. 

Russia remained set on their position that the annexation of Crimea was a fait accompli and brushed aside US demands that they pull back the tens of thousands of Russian troops massed along Ukraine's eastern border, saying the troops are merely participating in a routine military exercise and adding that Russia has “no plans” to invade Ukraine.  Kerry, meanwhile, turned down Russian demands that Ukraine adopt a “federal” form of government – where each of Ukraine's regions would be a de facto state, capable of making their own laws, collecting taxes and conducting foreign relations, while also maintaining broad autonomy for their ethnic minorities.  Kerry rejected the demand on the crazy notion that choosing Ukraine's form of government is a decision that the Ukrainians themselves should make.

The demand for a federalized form of government is emerging as the key to resolving the conflict from the Russian side.  Lavrov contended that a federal state was the only way that the rights and interests of ethnic Russians living in Ukraine could truly be protected.  Lavrov is continuing the idea pushed by the Putin government since the removal of President Viktor Yanukovych in February, that being a Russian living in Ukraine in 2014 is about the same as being a Jew living in Poland in 1940, while offering scant evidence to support the claim that the provisional government in Kiev is actually threatening the safety of Ukraine's Russian population.  This notion of an impending threat was the justification Russia used for its intervention in Crimea. 

The real reason behind Russia's push for the federalization of Ukraine though is to ensure that the country would be basically ungovernable from Kiev and to diminish Ukraine's prospects of having a prosperous future.  As explained in this earlier post, Putin's biggest fear over Ukraine is that the government that will take power after the upcoming elections in May will finally get their act together and put the country on the path to developing as a Western European-style market economy with an open and representative government.  To have a country so culturally tied to Russia successfully follow the post-Soviet path of development that has been seen in Poland and the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, would undercut the foundations of Putinism.  Russia, therefore, has a vested interest in making sure that Ukraine fails, the push for federalism is simply the latest attempt from Moscow to make this happen.  

The Strange Sanity of Vladimir Putin

One side-effect of getting a Master's Degree in international affairs with a specific focus on Russia and the former Soviet Union is whenever something important happens in that part of the world, your friends all ask for your views on the event.  This has been happening recently with the ongoing situation in Ukraine.  Questions about the sanity of Vladimir Putin have been coming up a lot lately, along with the definitive statement that “Putin IS crazy” over his (and by extension Russia's) actions with Crimea.

But the thing is, Putin's not crazy. In fact, he's far from it.  He may be cold, calculating and cunning, but crazy?  No.  But he is very much playing by a different set of rules than the global community and is being driven by a different set of impulses.  One quote that has been brought up quite often in the commentary about the Ukraine is Putin's statement that the breakup of the Soviet Union was the “greatest geopolitical mistake of the 20^th century”.  His seizure of the Crimean then is an attempt to rebuild the old Soviet Union, right?  Not exactly.  Rather Putin's Crimea gambit is not so much an attempt to restore the glory of the Soviet Union as it is trying to ensure that Ukraine continues to falter.

To better understand what's going on today, we need to take a very quick look at Putin and both Russia and Ukraine following the end of the Soviet Union in 1991.  Quite simply, Russia in the 1990s was a mess: a country rocked by economic turmoil, with a crumbling infrastructure and inept leadership in the form of the old, ailing and occasionally drunk Boris Yeltsin.  When Putin took over from Yeltsin in 1999, he had the unenviable task of rebuilding both the country and in reestablishing the role of government in the country.  Putin tackled this problem in two ways: the first was personal.  The images of Putin bare-chested in Siberian rivers, flying in fighter jets, throwing opponents on the judo mat, diving in submarines, and occasionally hugging a fuzzy puppy, have become a staple of late night comedy shows in the US.  But rather than expressions of odd personal vanity, these are carefully crafted images meant to portray Putin as a muzhik, a Russian term for a “real man” - a strong and virile leader, a counterpoise to the tottering Yeltsin.

Putin's second method was to strike a deal with the oligarchs – the class of businessmen who became fabulously wealthy and powerful in the chaos of the 1990s.  Putin agreed to let them have their business empires, so long as they didn't challenge his political authority.  The one oligarch who was seen as breaking this covenant – Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of the oil conglomerate Yukos and once Russia's richest man – was quickly jailed on dubious charges, his assets seized.  The rest of the oligarchs either fell in line or left the country; their media empires reinforced the image of Putin as a strong leader.  Of course Russia's citizens knew this was going on.  But under Putin the ruble stabilized, consumer goods became more available and affordable, life, for most, became more comfortable, so, for the most part, Russia's citizens went along with the deal.

Ukraine experienced a similar economic chaos after the end of the Soviet Union.  But for Ukraine, things didn't get better, the economy continued to falter, a small elite took advantage of corrupt leadership to become wildly wealthy.  In 2004 the people had enough; the mass public protests that came to be known as the Orange Revolution swept aside the existing government.  But the new government formed by the Orange Revolution's leaders Viktor Yushenko and Yulia Tymoshenko was consumed by infighting between their two rival factions.  The economy continued to falter, so much so that Ukrainians would eventually reelect President Viktor Yanukovich, the very man the Orange Revolution drove from power.  Yanukovich continued to rip off the state, while cozying up to to Putin and moving Ukraine closer to Moscow, which sparked off another round of public protests, the EuroMaidan, that again drove him from power.

Putin's fear now is that this time the new leaders of Ukraine might get it right – that they could set Ukraine on the path to development and prosperity.  It is not an idle fear.  While things are much better in Russia today than they were in the 1990s, the country still lags far behind most other European countries.  The average monthly salary in Russia is just $500 a month, far lower than in much of Europe, especially western Europe.  Again, Russians are aware of the disparity, many Russians have friends or family who live in the “West” (the United States, Great Britain, Canada, etc.), so they know that other countries have higher standards of living, less corruption, better infrastructure, and so on.  But these positives are balanced out by statements of the problems with these foreign societies: the Americans are too driven by careers; the British are too fussy.  When those stereotypes fail, the fall-back argument is while these societies may work fine for their native ethnicities, they would never work in Russia because they fail to understand the ever-mysterious “Russian Soul” (which contrary to Russian belief isn't all that mysterious); Russia as a nation may have its short-comings, but the society has “soul”.

But this argument would hall apart should Ukraine follow a path like Poland and transition to becoming an open and prosperous (relative to their position at the end of the Cold War) society.  Another frequently made point over these past few weeks is how the Russian and Ukrainian people are “brothers”.  The Russian identity started not in Moscow, but near Kiev, 1,000 years ago; Kiev, and Ukraine, still hold a mythic place in the Russian imagination.  Ukraine already has a much more open press and has staged far freer elections in recent years than Russia.  If this were paired with economic growth, should Ukraine's per capita income surpass that of Russia, then the theoretical underpinning of Putinism – that Russia is such a complex society it needs a “strong” leader – would be swept aside.  This is what keeps Putin awake at night, the thought that Ukraine might succeed in a way that Russia has not and that the Russian people would take notice.  This is why Putin is determined to undermine the provisional government in Kiev and the one that will take office following the scheduled May elections.  Ukraine cannot be given the chance to develop outside his shadow and in a way that may surpass his creation.

The situation in Ukraine will remain highly volatile.  While it is unlikely that Putin wants a war, he does benefit from the perception that a war could happen and the instability that brings to Ukraine.  Putin does not believe that the West, particularly the United States, will take any meaningful action to stop him, in large part because Russia faced no serious repercussions following their conflict with Georgia in 2008 and because Europe is dependent on energy supplies, particularly natural gas, from Russia.  This is a recipe though for miscalculation.  The longer that armed and angry men are kept faced off with each other, the chance for an accident that sparks off a conflict grows.  And if Ukraine is invaded or otherwise drawn into a conflict, the US and European Union will be compelled  to act in reply, whether they want to or not.      

So while Putin is not crazy, he is currently smug, arrogant and over-confident in the strength of his position, which is almost just as bad.

Why Russia Loves Syria

Even though the international community has largely turned against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over his government's brutal response to internal dissent, Russia has remained a staunch supporter of the Middle Eastern state.  In my latest post over at The Mantle, I take a look at the why of Russia's backing for Syria.  Rather than just outright anti-Western stubborness by Vladimir Putin, Russian support for Syria is driven by some unexpected factors like religion and a desire to cling to the remnants of their once glorious Soviet past. 

A New Capital For Russia?

Is a new capital city the key to revitalizing Russia's economy?  That is the idea being floated by Sergei Karaganov, the world economy and international affairs faculty dean at the Moscow Higher School of Economics, who wants to elevate Vladivostok, the Russian port city on the Pacific, near the borders of both China and North Korea, and more than 4,000 miles from Moscow, to capital city status.

Rather than shipping the seat of Russian power and governance east, Karaganov is talking about making Vladivostok a third capital city for Russia: Vladivostok would be the economic capital of the country, joining Moscow (political) and St. Petersburg (cultural) in this strata.  Karaganov's rationale is that the focus of the global economy is drifting steadily eastward and that Vladivostok is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this shift.  An economic capital in Vladivostok would make Russia a serious player in global trade patterns of the Pacific Rim and would signal that Russia was serious about building lasting ties with emerging Asian economic powers.

Karaganov's idea isn't as crazy as it may first sound.  Much of Russia's wealth in natural resources lie in the Asian portion of the nation; one of the largest economic infrastructure projects in Russia in the past decade has been the development of natural gas resources on and around Sakhalin Island on Russia's Pacific Coast; last year Russia opened the ESPO pipeline to send Siberian crude oil to energy-hungry China. And one other Pacific nation has already followed Karaganov's lead.  Earlier this year, the island nation of Samoa lost an entire day as it officially switched from one side of the International Dateline to the other – Samoa had originally opted to be on the same side of the IDL as the United States, which at the time was their main trading partner, but flipped to the Asian side to reflect the fact that now most of their trade is with countries like Australia and New Zealand.

Vladivostok today is a fairly run-down port city that has far more economic interaction with Japan and China than it does Moscow.  In fact, Vladivostok was the site of some of the largest public protests seen in Russia before last December's rallies against what were seen as rigged Parliamentary elections.  People took to the streets in Vladivostok in 2009 to protest new tariffs levied against imported used cars that Moscow launched as an effort to save Russia's ailing domestic auto industry. Importing used cars from Japan is one of the key economic drivers in Vladivostok, and local residents feared that the new tariffs would cripple their city's economy.

It's doubtful that the Putin government will take Karaganov's idea seriously, but that doesn't mean that it is not an innovative approach to deal with a very real issue in the Russian economy. 

Putin's Potemkin Inauguration

I was on vacation last week, so I'm still getting caught up on things that I missed while I was away.  One of those things was the inauguration of Russian President Vladimir Putin, though I don't feel so bad since most Muscovites missed out on that event as well.

Putin's inaugural was carefully crafted to impress.  Gilt-covered doors were opened by uniformed Kremlin guards to allow Putin to stride across a gleaming white marble floor, in front of a gathering of decked-out dignitaries, all under a vaulted golden ceiling to take the oath of office.  But there was something missing: minutes earlier, aerial shots on television showed Putin's limousine, guarded by a phalanx of motorcycle police, speeding through Moscow streets utterly devoid of people.  It had the eerie feeling of one of those post-apocalypse that are all the rage today.  Where were the people? (One Russian satirist even noted there were no birds in the TV shots and asked how did they drive away the birds?)  Crowds turned out for the inaugural of Francois Hollande in economically-depressed France just days later, so where were the Russians to celebrate the biggest political event of the year in Russia?

The truth is that the crowds were kept away from the celebration by design, and that for all of his alpha-male bluster, Putin is, at heart, deeply afraid of the people he pledged to lead for the next six years.  The fear isn't that someone in the crowd will try to assassinate Putin or commit some act of terrorism, but rather that they'll do something far more subversive, like boo, or wear a white ribbon.

The Putin team learned just how troublesome the general public could be last November.  Putin stepped into the ring of a mixed martial arts event being broadcast live across Russia on the NTV network to congratulate the winning fighter Fedor Emelianenko.  For Putin, a martial arts enthusiast, it seemed a quick way to score a few points and burnish his he-man image.  But the crowd of 20,000 started booing once Putin hit the ring, a public scolding broadcast live to the nation that would later become a staple on Russian social network Internet sites.  The Kremlin tried to spin the event as an unruly crowd jeering defeated American fighter Jeff Monson, though Internet-savvy Russians would later flood Monson's Facebook page with messages of support for Monson and to confirm that Putin was the target of their ire.

 It's not a coincidence that just a month later, previously politically-apathetic Russians would take to the streets in the tens and hundreds of thousands to protest allegations of fraud in December's parliamentary elections; protests against the rule of Putin that have continued through to today (the white ribbon has become the de facto symbol of anti-Putin protesters, though the Boss, with typical Putin bravado, said the ribbons looked like used condoms). 

Team Putin has learned the lesson that many other autocrats have: once the people lose their fear of speaking out against the leadership, they tend to keep on speaking.  That is why we had the odd visuals of motorcycle police escorting Putin's motorcade though deserted Moscow streets, there to protect Putin from no one, apparently.  This puts Putin in an odd position.  He has spent the past 12 years carefully crafting an image of himself as not only a Russian superman, but also as a Russian everyman, a true man of the people; yet now he fears the people for their unruliness and their unpleasant demands that he actually make good on the promises he's offered for the past decade about tackling corruption and turning Russia's legal and political systems into something more than vehicles to simply make the oligarch class richer.

In his third term in office, Putin will likely find that actually serving as the leader of a nation is much more difficult than just playing one on TV.

Tymoshenko: From Prime Minister To Political Prisoner

Even though she is out of office, former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko continues to dominate the political life of Ukraine.

The past few years have seen a true reversal of fortune for Tymoshenko.  In 2004, she was one of the two heroes of the Orange Revolution, along with the eventual president Viktor Yushchenko; but infighting between her faction and supporters of Yushchenko would paralyze Ukraine's government, helping to stifle the national economy and eventually lead to the re-election of former President Viktor Yanukovich, whose ham-handed attempts at vote-rigging in 2004 sparked the Orange Revolution in the first place.

Tymoshenko was set to lead a opposition faction in Ukraine's parliament, but was jailed first on charges that as Prime Minister she illegally diverted funds from a government greenhouse gas emissions reduction program.  Tymoshenko now also faces charges of tax evasion dating back to the 1990s, when she amassed a personal fortune operating a natural gas pipeline network in Ukraine (a position that earned her the unfortunate nickname of “the gas princess”).  The charges seem eerily similar to those leveled against Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of the oil conglomerate Yukos, in 2003.  And just as critics have said that the charges made against  Khodorkovsky were political payback from his rival Vladimir Putin, the charges against Tymoshenko are widely seen as a move by Yanukovich to keep her out of Ukrainian politics.

But the Tymoshenko case is starting to spin wildly out of control.  Tymoshenko began complaining that her jailers were not treating long-standing medical problems she has with her back, a condition that was causing her near-constant pain.  Tymoshenko began a hunger strike to protest both her arrest and the conditions of her imprisonment.  Now, photos have surfaced of Tymoshenko with visible brusies on her arms that she claims are the result of rough treatment by her jailers.  Tymoshenko's daughter Evgenia said at a press conference earlier this week that her mother's condition is worsening due to the back problem, abuse and hunger strike.

The Tymoshenko issue is turning into a major international embarrassment for Ukraine.  Several European leaders have pulled out of a summit meeting planned for later in May in Yalta, Ukraine in protest.  Leaders like Germany's Angela Merkel are also suggesting that they will stay away from UEFA's Euro 2012 soccer tournament this summer if the Tymoshenko situation is not resolved.  Co-hosting the Euro 2012 tournament (along with Poland) is a major accomplishment for Ukraine in their post-Soviet history, a boycott by European heads-of-state would be a stinging rebuke to Yanukovich's government.  To make matters even a little worse, the city of Dnipropetrovsk, which is scheduled to host some of the Euro 2012 games, was rocked by a series of explosions caused by bombs dumped in trash bins around the city.  Thirty people were injured in the blasts.  UEFA has issued a statement of official concern to Ukraine over the blasts, which are being treated as terrorism, though no group has yet stepped forward to claim responsibility.

Meanwhile, the Tymoshenko situation will hang over Ukraine's relations with the rest of Europe.  She may no longer be prime minister, but Yulia Tymoshenko continues to drive Ukrainian politics.

Britain's Prince Harry, or Russia's Next Czar?

As the youngest son of the heir to the British throne, Prince Harry's prospects for ever becoming king are pretty remote, so if he's seeking the top title, Harry may want to consider exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky's proposal.  In one of the crazier political notions to come along in awhile, Berezovsky is, apparently seriously, suggesting that Harry be crowned the next Czar of Russia.

It is part of the platform of Berezovsky's new political party for Russia, the Resurrection Movement.  Among the Movement's other goals are the liberalization of Russia's immigration laws, reform of the legal system and transformation of Russia into a confederation of states.  And then there's the Prince (or Czar) Harry thing... Berezovsky explains that: “returning the monarchy to the throne will reinstate an interrupted chain of time and become a symbol of the rebirth of Russia,” while noting that Harry “has more Russian blood than the last Russian Emperor Nicholas II.”  Prince Harry's great grandmother was a member of Russia's Romanov dynasty – pictures from the era show that Czar Nicholas II shared an amazing likeness with Britain's King George V, his cousin.

Needless to say, this bizarre, amusing proposal will sadly never happen.   Berezovsky, a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin, said he will not even attempt to register the Resurrection Movement as an official political party in Russia so long as Putin is running the government.  Berezovsky himself relocated to London after getting on the wrong side of Putin.

The Patriarch's Watch

A sharp-eyed member of the Russian bologosphere has swept the head of the Russian Orthodox Church up in a photo controversy. 

The church published a photograph of their spiritual head, Patriarch Kirill, at a meeting, but a blogger noticed something odd.  Taking a close look, they realized that the Patriarch's $30,000  gold Breguet watch had been airbrushed off his wrist, but that a reflection of the watch was still visible in the highly-polished surface of the table where Patriarch Kirill was seated. 

At first, the church denied that the Patriarch was wearing such an expensive watch, then they removed the photo from their official website, before finally admitting to the manipulation.  The Russian Orthodox Church then went on to condemn the digital manipulation of images of the Patriarch adding that “the guilty ones will be punished severely.”  Though Patriarch Kirill himself denies that expensive gold watches are a part of his official attire, another photo of the Patriarch wearing the same $30,000 Breguet while posing with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was also published this past February.

So what's so important about the Patriarch's choice of wristwatch?  Perhaps not a lot, but it is worth noting that after the Russian punk band Pussy Riot's impromptu “punk prayer” performance late last February at Moscow's Christ the Savior cathedral, they claimed part of their motivation was because the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church wore watches worth $40,000 – several years wages for many average Russians.  Two of Pussy Riot's members remain in jail facing charges of inciting religious hatred stemming from the performance, which could earn them seven years in prison.

Stalin: The Notebook

Apparently there's a new bestseller in Russian bookstores.  No, it's not a Russian knock-off of the Hunger Games series, but rather a humble school notebook with the image of former Soviet leader Josef Stalin emblazoned on the cover.  The book is part of a series called “Great Russians” meant to expose schoolchildren to noteworthy figures from Russia's history: Czars, composers, scientists and, apparently, Joe Stalin.

There is, of course, a controversy surrounding the notebook.  There are some who say that the heroic image of Stalin, dressed in a sharp military uniform with a chest full of medals, is nothing short of propaganda aimed at impressionable children and that it totally ignores the fact that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens; the creation of the gulag system and of a culture of fear that persisted after his death.  In response to numerous complaints, Russia's Education Minister Andrei Fursenko said that while he disapproves of the notebooks, he can't legally block their sale.

The counter-argument is that Stalin was a great leader, who managed, against all odds, to lead the Soviet Union through the Second World War (or Great Patriotic War as it is known in Russia) and oversaw the defeat of Nazi Germany.  Many Russians still regard Stalin's reign as the high-water mark for the power and prestige of the Soviet Union – which, perhaps, explains why most of the notebook sales are said to be to adults.  Artyom Belan, art director of the publishing house that put out the Great Russians series makes a point Stalin supporters often do: "If we do a series of great Russians, should we strike the 20th century from the list altogether?" Belan asked in an interview published by USA Today, in other words, since we can't ignore the fact that Stalin existed, we may as well celebrate his accomplishments.

But I can think of a better reason though not to include Josef Stalin in a series on “Great Russians”: he wasn't Russian.  Stalin was actually born in the Soviet republic of Georgia.

You Can't Be Syria-ous

The big international affairs news of the weekend was the veto in the United Nations Security Council by Russia and China of proposed sanctions against the regime of Syria's Bashar al-Assad, who is continuing a bloody, months-long crackdown against pro-democracy demonstrators protesting against his brutal regime.  US ambassador to the UN Susan Rice was utterly beside herself following the vote, telling China, but more directly Russia, that they would now be responsible for the continuing deaths among Syrian civilians.

On the face of it, you wonder how anyone could vote against a resolution meant to try to prevent a dictator from murdering his own citizens.  From a practical level, part of Russia's rationale for vetoing the UNSC resolution was simply driven by recognition of the deep, long-standing ties between their country and a loyal client state.  It has been mentioned in media reports that Syria is a major buyer of Russian military exports; but Syria also hosts one of the few remaining foreign ports-of-call for the Russian Navy at the Mediterranean port of Tartus, without Syria, Russia would largely be shut out of the Middle East, a region in which the old Soviet Union enjoyed a fair level of influence.  It's possible that any follow-on regime to Assad's might be willing to continue this historic relationship, but that is a risk that Russia does not want to take.

But the Russian/Chinese veto of the Syrian resolution was more than just a comment on UN policy towards Syria, it was also a symbolic line in the sand draw for the US-led “Western” community of nations that they were not going to be allowed to pick and choose which regimes stayed in power, at least as long as China and Russia had a say in the matter.  Russia has been openly skeptical about last year's intervention in Libya, saying that the stated humanitarian mission was a cover story for the real goal of ousting a long-standing irritant to the West, Moammar Gadhafi.  And when you look at the uneven way that the humanitarian military operation was conducted – with the US/NATO coalition overlooking rebel atrocities committed against pro-Gadhafi towns for example - there is something to this notion.  Taking a look at the recent actions promoted by the United States, you can see a similar narrative shaping up against Iran (at least from the Russian/Chinese point-of-view), where the United States is pushing the global community to adopt a harsh sanctions regime targeting Iran's oil industry, meant to cripple the country economically by denying them revenue from their main export commodity.

That regime scheme is likely doomed to fail, in large part thanks to the Chinese – the largest buyer of Iranian oil exports – who are refusing to go along with the embargo.  Part of the Chinese rationale, and also the reason cited by countries like India and Turkey, is that the Iranian sanctions lack the blessing of the United Nations.  Saturday's vote makes it clear that such a blessing, either for more strict sanctions or ultimately military action against Iran, won't be coming thanks to the Russians and the Chinese.  Both countries are concerned about American influence in their backyards – for Russia, the former Soviet Republics and Satellites in Eastern Europe and Central Asia; for the Chinese in the Pacific Rim and, again, Central Asia – changing the regime in Iran would be a real feather in the foreign policy cap of Pres. Barack Obama, a move he could parlay into gains in the Russian/Chinese spheres of influence.  Russia and China therefore have a vested interest in making sure that such an event doesn't happen in Iran, Saturday's UN vote was just a small reminder of where things stand in this larger struggle.

Russia's Space Paranoia

The Russian space program faced a massive and embarrassing setback at the end of 2011 when their centerpiece Phobos-Grunt mission to Mars got stuck in low Earth orbit shortly after launch, destined for a fiery re-entry into the atmosphere sometime later this month.  Now the head of Russia's space agency, Roscosmos' Vladimir Popovkin, says he knows what went wrong - “foreign forces” interfered with Phobos-Grunt, sabotaging its mission.  “I wouldn't like to accuse anyone, but today there exists powerful means to influence spacecraft, and their use can't be excluded,” Popovkin said.  His comments seem to echo an allegation made by a retired Russian general back in November, shortly after Phobos-Grunt ran into problems; he cast the blame on a high-power radar array operated by the US military in Alaska.

Popovkin told Russia's Izvestia newspaper that “some Russian [space]craft had suffered 'unexplained' malfunctions while flying over another side of the globe beyond the reach of his nation's tracking facilities.”  While meant to blame foreign powers, Popovkin's comment gets to the heart of what really seems to have doomed Phobos-Grunt (along with explaining several other recent Russian space program failures), rampant cost-cutting in the Russian space program.  During the heyday of Russian exploration during the 1960s, the Soviet Union maintained a network of ground tracking stations and specially-outfitted communication ships so that Russian space missions were in near-constant contact with Russian ground controllers.  Today that network is gone.  When something went wrong with Phobos-Grunt, Russian controllers could only attempt to talk to the probe in blocks of time just a few minutes long when it was orbiting directly over Russia; Russian controllers later borrowed the use of a few radio-telescopes around the world to better their chances of reaching Phobos-Grunt.

Today though the once mighty Russian space program is being hit by budget cuts and a loss of experience as older engineers retire, without younger ones to replace them.  The result, predictably, has been a series of mission failures during the past year.  Still, according to noted space analyst James Oberg, “the urge to shift blame seems strong.”    

Russian Protests, Round Two

Call it an unwanted early Christmas present for Vladimir Putin.  Last Saturday, a crowd of perhaps as many as 100,000 people gathered in the streets of Moscow to protest against the Putin regime and parliamentary elections widely viewed as stolen; smaller rallies occurred in other cities across Russia.  It was the second time since the December 4 elections that Russians took to the streets in mass protests, and a sign that anger over the elections directed towards the Kremlin was not subsiding. 

The rallies on the 24^th were the second state-sanctioned protests since the elections earlier in the month.  Officials in the Kremlin tried to downplay the impact of the rallies, and the amount of anger in the public, by apparently under-estimating the size of the crowd gathered on Moscow's Sakharov Avenue.  The size of the crowd was officially put at 25,000, though one reporter from the BBC said that it appeared there were more people gathered than there had been at the previous rally, attendance at that rally was said to be 50,000; the stretch of Sakharov Avenue where the rally was staged is said to hold more than 100,000 people.  Video from the event showed a packed street, as well as some clever signs.  My personal favorite was one oversized placard, written in English, that said “Where's my money Hillary?”, an allusion to a charge made by Putin that the protesters were being paid by “Western” governments, and by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in particular, in an effort to undermine the Russian state.

It seems though that Putin & Co. will have to come up with some better rhetoric if they hope to diffuse the protest movement in Russia.  That the opposition was able to organize a second, even larger, round of protests mostly through the Internet, is a clear sign of the depth of disapproval directed towards the Kremlin and Putin.  The protesters are promising to stage a third series of rallies sometime in mid-January after Russia recovers from the New Years – Russian Orthodox Christmas holiday season, which typically brings Russia to a halt from the end of December through the first two weeks of January.  According to a poll of those in attendance at the December 24^th rally, nine-out-of-ten say they will attend another protest rally in the future.

But even though the protest movement seems to have legs, for the moment at least, it seems to lack a leader – at least it lacks someone who could pose a serious challenge to Putin in the presidential elections which will take place in March.  While each of Russia's three official opposition parties – The Communists, the Liberal Democrats and A Just Russia – are all expected to field candidates, it is unlikely that the opposition turning out in the streets across Russia will coalesce around any one of them.  Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov has announced that he too will be a candidate in the elections, but he is still being regarded with suspicion as a candidate planted by the Kremlin to draw off opposition votes.

And the Soviet Union’s last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, weighed in following Saturday’s rally, urging Putin to follow his lead and retire from political life.

Putin's Prokhorov Challenge

The unfolding political drama in Russia took another unexpected turn on Monday as billionaire businessman Mikhail Prokhorov threw his hat in the ring as a challenger to Vladimir Putin in next March's presidential elections.  His announcement came after an unusual series of Kremlin-sanctioned political protest rallies took place this weekend, with the largest in Moscow drawing a crowd officially estimated at 25,000.  Prokhorov is apparently hoping that he can ride a wave of political dissent rippling across Russia over elections last weekend that are widely believed to have been fixed in the Kremlin's favor. “I made a decision, probably the most serious decision in my life: I am going to the presidential election,” Prokhorov said at a news conference on Monday to announce his independent bid for the presidency.

In fact, the timing of his announcement was so good that some are wondering if Prokhorov isn't just a stalking horse candidate for Kremlin critics- a safe outlet for disaffected voters that won't challenge the established leadership.  Adding fuel to this theory are the statements over the weekend by one top Kremlin insider who said that Russia needed a new liberal party to serve the mostly urban protesters attending rallies in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other cities across Russia.

But I think that there are two factors going against this argument.  The first is that there really is no need for a stalking horse-type candidate to ensure an electoral victory for Putin.  While some Russians may be angry, and many more just fed up with the ongoing Age of Putin, none of the three opposition parties in the Duma (the Russian parliament) have anyone to offer up as a candidate with the popularity (albeit damaged popularity) or stature of Putin, meaning that for as much of a pounding as his image has taken in the past week, Vladimir Putin is still odds-on favorite to win the election in March.

Second, even if the Kremlin was going to try to offer up a straw man candidate, Prokhorov is a fairly poor choice since he was already burned politically by the Kremlin just earlier this year.  In May, Prokhorov took leadership of the party Pravoye Dyelo, a name which is alternately translated as Just Cause or Right Cause.  Prokhorov's new party was to be more populist-minded with a pro-business/anti-corruption platform that managed to steer clear of any cutting criticism of either Putin or current President Dmitry Medvedev – a delicate maneuver that left Right Cause open to charges that it was simply another Kremlin-approved opposition party in the mold of A Just Russia (in fact, much of Right Cause's platform seemed to echo the economic reform ideas being pushed by Medvedev earlier this year.  In May, Prokhorov boasted that Right Cause would become the second largest party in the Duma (behind the ruling United Russia of course) following December's elections. 

But Prokhorov seems to have taken his role as leader of Right Cause a little too seriously for some in the Kremlin.  In September, a secret Congress (so secret Prokhorov didn't know about it) was held among some of Right Cause's leaders and Prokhorov was voted out of his leadership role, a move Prokhorov blamed on Vladislav Surkov, a presidential deputy chief of staff, who serves a role for Putin much the same that Karl Rove did for President George W. Bush, and a man who Prokhorov blasted following the secret vote as: “a puppeteer in the country who has long privatized the political system.”  Prokhorov kept a low profile following his ouster from Right Cause, but stated on Monday that he had been planning and putting together the machinery needed to gather the two million ballot signatures required to get his name on the March presidential ballot.

There appears then to be some genuine animosity between Prokhorov and the Putin machine, so it would seem unlikely that he would then secretly be working with them on an ultimately unnecessary political maneuver.  What's more plausible is that Prokhorov, an aggressive businessman who at just age 46 has amassed a fortune in the billions, sees an opening and is planning to take it in terms of Putin's now-waning popularity, and if it is a chance to get back at Putin, whose associate Surkov publicly humiliated him in the Right Cause affair, all the better. 

With his declaration, comparisons are now rightly being drawn between Prokhorov and the last oligarch who challenged Putin publicly and politically, the former head of the Yukos oil conglomerate, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who is currently languishing in a prison cell in Russia's Far East on some dubious tax evasion charges.  But there is an interesting difference between the two men: in his book on the  Khodorkovsky affair, Putin's Oil, author Martin Sixsmith describes how Khodorkovsky publicly sparred with Putin in the months leading up to his arrest in 2003.  In the weeks before his arrest, Khodorkovsky was urged by friends to follow the lead of other oligarchs who had gotten on the wrong side of Putin and go into self-imposed exile outside of Russia.  But Khodorkovsky instead feverishly tried to negotiate a merger between Yukos and Exxon, his belief was that forming a business alliance with a major Western corporation would provide him with protection against Putin (in Russian the term is krysha, literally: roof) who would not want to damage Russia's image as a place to do business by arresting the head of a multinational corporation on politically-motivated charges.   Khodorkovsky ultimately wasn't able to complete the merger and wound up being arrested as he had feared.

For his part, Prokhorov has the Western business connections Khodorkovsky lacked; among Prokhorov's other holdings are the NBA's New Jersey Nets.  Prokhorov then seems ready to test the Khodorkovsky theorem, how Putin, and the Russian voters, respond will be interesting to see.

United Russia's Bad Day

Pity poor Vladimir Putin, he's gone from the International Man of Action to a guy who can't even properly rig an election.

The results from Sunday's parliamentary elections are (mostly) in, and the ruling United Russia Party took a beating at the ballot box.  During the last elections in 2007, United Russia garnered 64% of the vote, but after Sunday it looks like the party of Putin will be lucky to crack the 50% threshold. With 95% of the ballots counted as of late on Monday, United Russia held a 49.5% share of the vote; in fact there was speculation that the official tally was being delayed so that election officials could “massage” the figures to put United Russia above the symbolic 50% marker.
 
What's more amazing is that United Russia is pulling only about 50% after staging massive voter fraud in their favor.  Reports out of Russia are that there were more reports of irregularities on Sunday than there were during the 2007 vote, which was also viewed with suspicion.  Vote monitors have collected nearly 5,000 reports of voting irregularities from Vladivostok in the Far East, to Kaliningrad, Russia's westernmost European enclave.  The most popular reports are of ballot boxes arriving at polling places pre-stuffed with votes for United Russia and of cadres of citizens being bussed from poling station to poling station, casting votes at each.  But the early results also showed that the Kremlin's decision to install strongman Razman Kadyrov as leader of Chechnya continues to pay dividends as nearly 100% of Chechen voters went to the polls with 99.48% casting ballot in favor of United Russia – I guess Kadyrov allowed the 0.52% of votes for other candidates to make the results look “legitimate”. 
 
Yet it is important to remember that even with widespread reports of voter fraud, United Russia still only received half of the votes cast, meaning actual support for Putin and his party is likely far lower among Russians.  The Russian opposition to Putin, however, did not coalesce around a single opposition party – the Communists are set to come in second with nearly 20%, even finishing ahead of United Russia in some regions; the populist-leaning A Just Russia finished third with 13% and the nationalist Liberal Democrats placed just behind them with 12%.  The liberal Yabloko party failed to break the 7% threshold parties need to pass to earn seats in the Duma.  But opposition parties are challenging the results in some localities and other opposition leaders, like Boris Nemtsov and Eduard Limonov are challenging the legitimacy of the entire election saying that their parties were illegally banned from participating in the election in the first place.
 
Predictably, Kremlin spokespeople tried to spin United Russia's electoral drubbing as a victory of sorts for Putin, noting that since the start of the great Global Recession in 2008 governments have been voted out of office in places like Spain and Great Britain, while in the United States the Republicans scored major electoral victories in 2010.  Thus, they argue, since United Russia managed to stay in power at all is a sign of faith in the party and in the ruling tandem of Putin and Dmitry Medvedev.  And there might even be something to their argument if not for the statements from Russian voters cited in almost any article you read about the elections, noting that their opposition to United Russia crystallized at the time when Putin announced he would be running for president again in 2012 – a sign, they say, that the political system had stagnated and that none of the oft-made promises for reform would ever occur.  Many Russians, the ones brave enough to talk with the press at least, are simply fed up with the now-seemingly eternal Era of Putin and have decided to take it out on his party.

So what will this election mean? In one sense, not much will change. United Russia will still control the Duma, meaning the legislative body is likely to remain little more than a rubber stamp for the Kremlin.  But in another sense, Sunday's elections could be a signal of a turning point, where the typically apolitical Russian public finally starts to engage with their democracy.  As of Monday night, protesters were taking to the streets in Moscow, by some estimates in a crowd of up to 10,000, chanting “Russia without Putin”, a slogan of one opposition movement.  It will be interesting to see how Putin himself responds.  Sunday's election in Russia reminds me of Zimbabwe's last presidential election in a sense.  In Zimbabwe, long-time strongman ruler Robert Mugabe seemed to eschew some of the heavy-handed tactics that had marked the previous presidential election; the result was that Mugabe finished a close second to Morgan Tsvangirai and the reformist Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).  Mugabe decided to take no chances in the runoff, unleashing Zimbabwe's state security forces, along with thugs from his own ZANU-PF party against the MDC with such a degree of violence that Tsvangirai pulled out of the run-off both for his own safety and the safety of the MDC's supporters.

It will be interesting to see if Putin follows a similar tack for the Presidential elections scheduled just three months from now.  While it is hard to see an opposition candidate emerging who could unite Russia's opposition and defeat him, Putin is unlikely to want to take that risk, or to squeak into the presidency with only 40% of the vote in a divided field.  So it is entirely possible that his response could be to crack town even harder on Russia's opposition parties and to engage in even more ballot-rigging.  The question then becomes how will the international community respond to a fraudulent election, and how will the Russians themselves respond.  It's worth noting that at this time last year, it was hard to imagine that Hosni Mubarak and Moammar Gadhafi would be driven from office by popular revolutions.

Real Housewives of the Kremlin

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has long been the United States' official journalistic voice to the world, and a source of quality reporting, which makes the appearance of this rather tabloid-y (but still interesting) story about Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin rather interesting.  In it, journalist and German intelligence expert,  Erich Schmidt-Eenboom makes the claim that during Putin's time as a KGB agent in East Germany, a West German counter-agent was able to penetrate his inner circle and become a close confidant to Putin's wife Lyudmila, and that's where the juicy details come in.  According to the report, Lyudmila Putina confided to the agent, identified as a woman called “Lenochka”, that Putin was a womanizer who regularly beat her.  Lenochka herself was later removed from the assignment after falling in love with the KGB colonel who ran Putin's unit.

It is a description of the Putins relationship at odds at least with the carefully-crafted public image of the couple.  Shortly after Putin quickly rose from obscurity to become President Boris Yeltsin's handpicked successor, a biography of personal anecdotes from Putin's early years called First Person was published; one of the stories it contained was how in the early days of his marriage Putin nursed Lyudmila back to health after she was badly injured in a car accident.  However, as RFE/RL notes, Putin has otherwise been fiercely protective of his private life, with his daughters never appearing in public or the press and, as RFE/RL wryly notes, public appearances with Lyudmila “have become as rare as Siberian yeti sightings.”  Now it is one thing to keep his daughters out of the public eye, but politicians wives are expected to pubicly support their husbands, which makes Lyudmila's absence all the more unusual, fueling rumors that the couple had in fact divorced or that Putin was keeping a girlfriend on the side, possibly (according to Russia's version of gossip columnists) former Olympic gold medalist, gymnast and current member of parliament, Alina Kabayeva.

Beyond the sleazy salaciousness of the Putin story, I also find it interesting that RFE/RL chose to run such a gossipy piece in the first place.  You have to wonder if this is part of a subtle media campaign to undermine the public image of the once and future President of Russia, since the column has appeared shortly after Putin announced that he, rather than current President Dmitry Medvedev, would be representing the United Russia party in next year's presidential election.  And then there is the sinking popularity of United Russia itself.  While still the dominant party in Russian politics, United Russia's own popularity is waning.  In a recent poll, only 51% of Russians said they would support United Russia, a drop of 9% from the previous poll.  In an effort to boost their profile ahead of parliamentary elections in December, United Russia released an edgy TV ad designed to appeal to young voters: in it a young woman exchanges glances with a young man before stepping into the voting booth, her hand then shoots out from behind the voting booth curtain, grabbing him and dragging him inside.  After a few seconds, the two disheveled voters emerge from the booth with the tagline “Let's Do It Together” then appearing on screen (y'know, vote).  The racy ad is being roundly criticized by opposition politicians who note that voting is something one is suppose to do alone.   

Kim's Excellent Siberian Adventure

Though largely overshadowed by events elsewhere in the world, North Korea's reclusive leader, Kim Jong-il has spent the past few days meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and touring sites in Russia's Far East and Siberia regions. The trip marks the first time in almost a decade that the Dear Leader has paid a visit to his former Cold War ally.

The reason for the trip, of course, is business and to boost ties between the two nations. Russia got the ball rolling by pledging a gift of 50,000 tons of wheat to perpetually-hungry North Korea. Russia's real goal though is to get North Korea to give permission for the construction of a natural gas pipeline across their territory so that Russia can ship its gas directly to South Korea. Traditionally, most of Russia's natural gas has gone west, though pipelines, to markets in Europe. But Russia in recent years has been trying to diversify their gas clientele; they are actively working on liquid natural gas (or LNG) export facilities on the Pacific coast and north central Russia that would allow them to ship gas via LNG tanker to any part of the globe. A pipeline to South Korea would also give Russia another lucrative outlet for their gas, with the pipeline likely ensuring a long-term agreement between the two countries. Of course, this will also subject the Russia-South Korea gas relationship to the whims of the always mercurial Mr. Kim, a situation that seems all too similar, from a Russian perspective that is, to their relationship with Ukraine, which is currently the major transit point for their European gas shipments. Friction between Russia and Ukraine over payments for that gas has resulted in several shutdowns of the pipeline network in the past few years, causing fuel shortages across Europe.

But Russia seems willing to risk it with North Korea. One reason for the Russian position could be the unfolding events in Libya. Russian companies, like the quasi-national energy conglomerate Gazprom, currently have large contracts with the Gadhafi regime to develop Libya's oil and gas reserves. With Gadhafi seemingly on his way out, there is fear in Russia that a new rebel-backed government will be pro-NATO and by extension, anti-Russian, meaning Gazprom and other Russian firms could find themselves frozen out of the new Libya (early word from the would-be rebel government though is that they will honor all existing oil and gas contracts). From the other side, there are signs that Kim Jong-il may be looking to once again play nice with the international community. During his visit, word was leaked that North Korea may be willing to declare a moratorium in their pursuit of nuclear weapons, a key precondition set by the international community for any talks with North Korea.

Its also been interesting to see the Dear Leader in the flesh in Russia. For the past couple of years, rumors have circulated about Kim Jong-il's health, with most centering on the belief that he suffered a major stroke. Getting news about Kim out of North Korea is always a tricky matter since the state-controlled media has a penchant for running old footage of Kim as current events coverage. In the few verifiable current pictures of him, Kim looked thin and pretty bad shape. Kim's Siberia trip seems to be agreeing with him though. While he does look markedly older (Kim is somewhere near 70 years old), he looks more like his pudgy, strangely-content self than he has in other recent images.

Chinese Carrier Kerfuffle

China made headlines this week with the launch of their first aircraft carrier. The move also made waves on op-ed pages as a host of columnists pointed to the launch as yet another sign of China's growing international clout, military might and territorial ambitions. Launching an aircraft carrier is being seen as a direct challenge to American control of the seas, since the United States has dominated the aircraft carrier field since the end of World War II; the US State Department added a little fuel to this fire on Wednesday by sending a formal request to China to explain why they feel the need for “this type of equipment”.

The ship in question is “Chinese” inasmuch as China currently owns it, but the ship began life back in the old Soviet Union as the Varyag. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Varyag spent years rusting away in a Ukrainian shipyard until being sold and towed to China (the Ukrainians sold the Varyag less its engines) where it sat rusting in another shipyard, possibly to become a floating casino in Macau, before the Chinese decided to refurbish it and put it into service as their very first aircraft carrier. Given that lineage, the Chinese aircraft carrier starts to sound a lot less intimidating. Add to that account two other stories from earlier in the year: an account from the Washington Post in January about how the Chinese air force remains dependent on Russian-built jet engines since the domestically-made versions just don't perform as well, and reports that the crews of the ships the People's Liberation Army Navy sent to participate in anti-piracy operations off of Somalia reported severe morale and supply problems due to the length and distance of their mission; the Chinese navy sounds even less formitable still.

The Varyag, or whatever the Chinese eventually decide to call her, isn't itself a game-changer in terms of naval power around the globe, but it plays nicely into an existing narrative of a China growing in economic/industrial power and a China that is becoming more aggressive with its neighbors. According to reports, the Chinese plan to field three carrier battlegroups by 2050. Of course 2050 is a long way off, forty years from now the aircraft carrier as a ship design may very well be obsolete. It also supposes that China will continue on an unbroken path as an emerging superpower, which is a pretty big assumption. It is easy to look at China, which recently became the world's second-largest economy, and presume that this is what will happen. But it ignores potentially serious problems within China that could derail their ascendancy: climbing rates of inflation, a potential economic housing bubble, a growing disparity between rich and poor and simmering ethnic tensions. In his new book, The Next Decade, George Friedman of the geopolitical risk group Stratfor makes a compelling case for the idea that China may now be near its peak of power, with internal problems dragging the country backward by the end of the decade.

It is a viewpoint to consider while reading tales about China's second-hand carrier.

Remembering US Soft Power

There's an interesting piece up right now on Foreign Policy's “The Oil and The Glory” blog on US diplomatic efforts in Georgia – an American chef from California's Napa Valley recently gave a cooking demonstration at the house of the US ambassador to Georgian chefs on how to prepare recipes using wine and grapes from Georgia's indigenous wine-making regions. The whole event was broadcast on Georgian TV and was reportedly well-received by the Georgians. Author Steve LeVine argues that it was a fine example of “soft power” on the part of the United States, something which diplomatically we use to excel at, but have abandoned in the past decade thanks to changes in presidential policy and the War on Terror (soft power is opposed to “hard power”, e.g. military action, which has been the primary focus of US international efforts in the past few years).

LeVine is right in his assessment. The United States has put soft power efforts on the back-burner this past decade, after all, where's the room for cooking demonstrations when there's terrorists to hit with drone airstrikes? At the same time though, China has been making real progress diplomatically, especially in Africa, through the use of soft power efforts like development aid and underwriting vital infrastructure projects alone. It's worth noting that the United States came out on the winning side of the Cold War not through military might, but largely because it had the system of government and society that people wanted to immigrate to, rather than the Soviet model that significant numbers of people tried to escape from. And the image of that government and culture were spread in large part though American soft power efforts. The Georgia cooking show demonstrates that soft power can still be an effective tool for American foreign policy today as well.

Georgia's Independence Day “Celebrations”

Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili chose an interesting way to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his nation's independence – by sending in riot troops to break up a protest against his regime in a move that left at least two protesters dead and several dozen others injured. As we reported here earlier in the week, about 6,000 people turned out for a protest against what they say was the growing autocracy of Saakashvili's regime (a protest that was also broken up by the riot police) and planned for an even bigger showing on Wednesday, Georgia's Independence Day. Saakashvili was quick to blame the protests on his old nemesis – Russia, contending that the demonstrators weren't Georgians asking for better government, but rather were provocateurs acting on behalf of Geogria's “enemy and occupier” (here Saakashvili is referring to the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia which both declared their independence from Georgia. Russia currently has peacekeeping troops based in both).

Saaakashvili's statement begs two questions: First, why do these leaders always insist protesters are crazy or foreign agents or “on drugs” as Libya's Moammar Gadhafi and Uganda's Yoweri Museveni both have recently done? Can't they just accept the fact that in any country, no matter how well or poorly run, there will be people opposed to your rule for a whole host of reasons? Scapegoating the protesters only makes the ruling regime look weak.

Secondly, and more importantly, is how long will the United States continue to have a double standard in responding to the violent putdown of obstensibly pro-democracy protests? Shortly after Saakashvili sent in the riot troops, US ambassador John Bass said “it is also important to remember that there were clearly a number of people included in that protest who were not interested in peacefully protesting, but were looking to spark a violent confrontation.” By comparison, the European Commission said that while they understood the need to restore order, the use of force was “very regrettable”, especially since Saakashvili had riot troops violently breakup pro-reform protests just four years ago, a fact ignored by Ambassador Bass.

It's not surprising since the United States has been more than willing to overlook Saakashvili's democratic shortcomings for years now because he is staunchly pro-Western and is seen as a check against Russian influence in the region. But he's also part of a disturbing pattern in US foreign policy. While the US has been vocal in its support for the Libyan rebels who are opposing Gadhafi and after deciding that Hosni Mubarak was no longer worth the trouble, the US threw its support behind Egypt's pro-democracy movement; America has been largely silent about the government of Bahrain's violent put-down of that country's pro-democracy movement because the current rulers of Bahrain a) allow their country to be used as a base for the US Navy's Fifth Fleet and b) are tightly allied with the House of Saud. So as long as Saakashvili remains reliably pro-Western/anti-Russian, and allows his country to be used as a transit route for western-bound oil and Afghanistan-bound troops, he'll likely get no complaints from the United States.

On the topic of democratic reform movements then, the United States is sending some very mixed signals; the problem is that the rest of the world is listening.

Who Wants To Rule Russia?

There's a new chapter in the ongoing political soap opera “Who Wants To Rule Russia?”, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister (and former President) Vladimir Putin's wrangling over which one of them will run for the top job in next year's presidential elections. The Russian constitution bars anyone from serving more than two consecutive terms, which is why Putin had to turn over the reins of power to Medvedev. While the two publicly present themselves as a “ruling tandem”, conventional wisdom has been that Medvedev is only keeping the seat warm for Putin, who will run for President again in 2012, a job that he could then keep until 2024 after the completion of two more terms in office.

Not so fast, say some familiar with the inner workings of the Kremlin. Medvedev, they say, has grown into the job of president and sees himself as the only one who can push forward much-needed political and economic reforms in Russia, and he's now willing to stand up to The Boss. That's the word from Konstantin Zatulin, a respected member of the Duma (Russian parliament) and a member of Putin's political party, United Russia. Zatulin claims that Medvedev's political allies were working behind the scenes to undermine support for Putin, particularly within the parliament. Medvedev also seems to be asserting himself of late, and in the process taking on Putin. One high-profile action was Medvedev's decision to bar ranking government officials from also serving on corporate boards of directors, an action that seems aimed squarely at one of Putin's most powerful lieutenants, Igor Sechin, a deputy prime minister and also chair of the board of Rosneft, one of Russia's largest energy companies. Medvedev has taken aim at such arrangements, saying that Russia's largest companies are too closely tied with ranking members of the government – a situation that stifles economic growth and hampers foreign investment in Russia. Putin, meanwhile, supports the “statist” approach to governance, where the economy is driven by a few key corporations which themselves are intimately tied to an inner circle of power at the top level of government.

Other Russian political observers disagree with Zatulin’s assessment, either saying that the Putin-Medvedev tandem is strong and that a decision has already been made about which one will stand for election next year, or that Medvedev simply is not powerful enough to push Putin aside. One indication of where things may be headed is a rumor that some members of the Duma may split off from United Russia to form their own political party, likely named “Fair Russia” which could then be a vehicle for a Medvedev 2012 presidential run. And just in case you think there's no humor in this situation, check out the trailer for the disaster movie “2012”, reworked to tell the story of next year's Russian elections.