Putin’s PR service pretends that he’s still in charge and managing something. They recorded how bravely he hit the table with
his fist while visiting a military field somewhere deep in the Russian province which is quite far away from the front.
Perhaps, they finally realized that it doesn’t look really good that he is ruling the country from his bunker during the war.
So, they decided to let him out from time to time to do something military appropriate.
Meanwhile, the country is living a different life, and there are processes Putin can’t influence anymore
but we watch them closely. And the first one among those dark scenarios is gradual destruction of governmental tissue.
This destruction started because of Putin who wants victories whatever the cost is.
But now, it’s not a fact that someone is watching over this process at all. For his whole career as a President,
literally since 2000 while he was an acting President, he has been building a vertical – a management,
budgetary and force vertical. It was an excessive and ineffective vertical where regional and municipal power was just an
accounting institution. And its power was reduced to accepting and spending money already distributed by the center.
It was a vertical where local and regional governments couldn’t even fix a school’s façade on their own because
they had no managing and financial power. Because evetiny decision should have been approved by the center.
However, the goal was obvious – it doesn’t matter if the system is ineffective, it’s much more important that it’s obedient.
We can’t have any “regional Fronde” when the governors aren’t politicians with their own voters
and money but appointed administrators. It might look like that for wartime this system can be quite good.
No initiative is possible there but at least there is one manager and no one can argue with it.
There is just one manager in the country, the Commander-in-Chief, the others just implement his wishes.
But the paradox is that during the war this system began falling apart.
LEGAL FRAMEWORK DESTRUCTION
Since the very beginning of the war there was a grim joke – that it’s not the LDNR joining Russia, it’s Russia joining the LDNR.
Now, we have what we have – it’s not a joke anymore, it’s a representation of reality which seemed unthinkable a year ago.
What are DNR and LNR? Those are the territories of no rights. In this case no rights is not an emotional assessment
but a fact – there are no human rights there, or norms you can appeal to.
The internal policy there (if we may say so) is just a competition between armed groups of different origin.
And what about the civilians who can’t take their own gun when they are threatened?
For those armed groups the civilians are just fodder. It's not even like the 90s.
Because with all the financial and force power of the criminal groups from Solntsevo, Orekhovo-Borisovo, Uralmash,
and Tambov, the direct confrontation with the government wasn’t good for them.
In the 90s Russia was a weak and corrupt government, but still a government.
And however weak it was, the government working under the written norms had much more violence
resources than all the criminal groups altogether.
Criminal organizations could corrupt the government and manipulate it on some level.
Criminals could bribe and frighten the bureaucrats, politicians or force agents, they could even become bureaucrats,
politicians or force agents themselves. But still, they existed in the frame the government created.
The craziest things also happened. For example, in the center of Moscow the fighters from the opposing group
could shoot the opponents. But after that, the killers had to run and hide.
They couldn’t just sit in the café next door and pretend everything was fine.
They could corrupt police officers so that they omitted or lost the evidence or the suspects.
They could bribe the detective so that he would exclude some episodes and reconsider the others.
Or the prosecutor so that he would give some accusations up.
Or the judge – so that he would give as mild a sentence as he could.
And finally, the prison manager – so that he would provide nice conditions for imprisonment.
So, the criminal could kill two people and get 3 or 4 years instead of life imprisonment and get parole for good behavior
and participation in prison activities. It’s very, very bad, but this “bad” was a manipulation with governmental norms and rules.
It existed within a frame. So, the first bad sign that Russia was becoming a part of LDNR was the figure of Evgeniy Prigozhin.
Three months ago there was first news from the prisons that the owner of the military company “Wagner” came there
in a helicopter, ordered the administration about and took whoever he wanted.
And now, this phenomenon is almost legal. Now, they talk about Prigozhin on TV, and no one hides that there
is such a person who is above law and court, who can execute and pardon people without any official status in the government.
Because he is above the government. He doesn’t have to make his actions legal. Law is not for him,
and he doesn’t care for any state institutions. And we must say that with every new day of war we have
more and more people and force groups who don’t just violate the law, they ignore the existence of the Russian government
and legal norms. For example, Ramzan Kadyrov is boasting to the whole country that he gave guns to his underage children
and sent them to the war. We’ve seen those ridiculous videos – teenagers dressed like the American Navy SEALs with a lot of
bodyguards around them. I hope there are not so many naïve people (even among the loyalists)
who would believe that Kadyrov’s children would ever come close to the frontline or would participate
in the war after that set-up video. It’s very illustrative.
In order to film a couple of videos and satisfy a very strange ambition and boast with his armed children
(not for some practical reasons), Kadyrov commits a military crime.
Yes, making children become combatants is a military crime, nothing else.
Established rules don’t stop Kadyrov if he decides to boast a bit. Prigozhin’s and Kadyrov’s behavior could seem
like some extraordinary cases of lawlessness. Until Vladimir Putin introduced martial law on the occupied territories
and different kinds of readiness in other parts of Russia.
In the case of the occupied territories, Vladimir Putin applied real legal norms. Not some “paid days off”, or “self-isolation regime”
and not even “partial mobilization”, but martial law, a real norm described in the Russian Constitution.
But where is it working? In the non-existent regions of Russia. In the illegally annexed territories of Ukraine
which they control less and less confidently. And in the regions which are legally and really Russian,
he introduced another legal regime of Shroedinger dividing the country by the levels of reaction.
What does it mean? That regional governments will get the same power as under the real martial law,
but the federal government takes no responsibility. No one introduced martial law there, and that means that all the actions
of the local government to eliminate the Russian law on its territories is just the matter of their relations with population.
Until now we had separate weird characters and organizations ignoring the laws of Russia and living
under the habits of LNR and DNR. But now the whole regions of Russia become the territories with vague laws.
The whole regions now live under the logic of “providing safety”. And you can do whatever you want under this motto –
you can arrest anyone illegally or take property away. And it won’t be “illegal” because the Shroedinger legal regime allows
the powers which cancel the possibility to appeal to the law. The citizens of such regions can’t say that they are being
treated illegally, that their rights are being violated. Because the introduced regime is described very generally –
you can’t violate something so vague.
FAILURE OF THE WAR
While degrading step by step to the level of LDNR in this war, Russia can’t handle this war either.
It can’t handle it because the army is also a governmental institution. And while the government is degrading,
the army is degrading too. The shadier the legal boundaries are,
the more difficult it is to make military men take responsibility. So, they can rob the stocks with armor and weapons even
easier than before the war. Now, after a row of shameful defeats of the Russian army in Balakliia,
Izium and Lyman, the news is coming from the Kherson region.
The Ukrainian troops started an offensive from New Kamenka towards Berislav. The reaction for that is dubious.
On the one hand, propaganda is saying how skillfully the Russian army is repelling the attacks of the Ukrainian army,
one after another, and making plans on “the liberation” of new regions of Ukraine.
On the other hand, they get Kherson ready for the defense.
The administration and the citizens are being evacuated to the left bank of Dnepr.
And General Surovikin declares in the first interview that a difficult decision might be made about Kherson.
We saw it when the Russian army retreated before – the louder propaganda shouts that Russia is forever on the occupied
lands, the sooner the army retreats from those territories. It means it’s possible that when talking
about difficult decisions about Kherson, Surovikin means another “rearrangement” or another “gesture of goodwill”.
Mobilization, which was the last hope to solve the problems at the front, just sped the degradation up.
Right after the announcement of mobilization the fight between two camps of executive power – the Ministry of Defense which
should recruit as many soldiers as it can, and the civil administrators who would have to deal with people’s
dissatisfaction caused by mobilization and respond to all the accidents. So, now every mayor, governor and republic head
are so hasty declaring the end of mobilization. The Ministry of Defense reminds them that civil bureaucrats have no power to
start or end mobilization. For example, in the Rostov region the governor Golubev declared the end of mobilization on
September 28, and conscription committees stopped working indeed.
However, the General Staff gave Golubev another plan and mobilization started again. Or Buryatia, for example.
On September 30 The head of the republic Tsydenov announced that the plan was fulfilled. However, it didn’t affect
the situation at all – mobilization hadn’t stopped.
And Tsydenov had to say some nonsense like it’s not mobilization, it’s extra recruiting.
THE LOSS OF POWER
It’s been clear for a while that the Russian army has lost the initiative at the front.
That it just reacts to the actions of the Ukrainian army as good as it can. We’ve seen a lot of attempts to get the initiative back
but mostly those were some psychological moves like the announcement of mobilization, massive shootings, threatening
statements, formal annexation of territories – and yet, nothing ensured necessary results.
Now we know for sure that the situation at the front depends on anyone and anything – on the Ukrainian commanders,
Western supplies, weather, terrain – but not on the Kremlin. Now we can see what is going on inside the country.
It doesn’t matter what topic we discuss – mobilization, army management, conflicts of the force interest groups –
in any video of the last month there’s no Vladimir Putin as a figure and no centralized management at all.
Sergey Sobyanin,Ramzan Kadyrov, Evgeniy Prigozhin, the Ministry of Defense, countless propaganda factories, every
region’s governor and military chief, State Duma deputies – all those people look like actors.
All of them have their interests, and they do things in their interests.
Except for Vladimir Putin. It looks like Putin's only interest is to refuse participating in anything and avoid any responsibility.
What will be the result? What will the personal autocracy with the vertical so transparent that it stopped existing will look like?
It seems it’s the main question. And we don’t know the answer.
It’s not clear how to assemble those colorful pieces into something whole. Even as of today.
And we will have to watch all this.
Till tomorrow!