Berlin The pictures that Russian state television broadcast on Thursday were highly unusual: During a visit to Dagestan, Vladimir Putin was cheered at close range, shook hands and kissed one or the other on the forehead.
For a long time, the Russian President did not consider such actions necessary. At least since the beginning of the pandemic, he demonstratively kept his distance, even from close confidants.
Putin seems concerned about his popularity with the people. Experts suspect that last weekend’s uprising may have damaged Russian confidence. In Rostov-on-Don, young women posed with the Wagner mercenaries, armored tubes were decorated with flowers. The residents seemed to welcome the insurgents.
The independent exile medium Meduza reports on survey data that the Kremlin is said to have shared with Russian ambassadors and regional politicians on Thursday. According to this, trust in Vladimir Putin fell by 9 to 14 percentage points after the uprising, depending on the region.
The independent opinion research institute Lewada, on the other hand, was only able to identify a slight decline in popularity and now sees Putin even emerging from the crisis stronger.
Next year there will be an election
What is certain is that something has started to move. Alexey Yusupov, head of the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation’s Russia program, is convinced that Vladimir Putin is no longer the person to be trusted for the future of Russia in next year’s Russian presidential elections – neither among the elite nor among the general public Population.
The weekend saw the start of a succession battle for the strongman’s place in the Russian Federation. “Prigozhin accidentally brought politics back to Russia,” Yusupov told Handelsblatt.
>> Read here: “The tipping point could come sooner” – Cracks are appearing in Putin’s power base
For decades, the unwritten social contract in Russia has been: the state guarantees stability and security – in return, the citizens do not get involved in politics.
Putin has been said to be very afraid of contracting Covid.
(Photo: AP)
“I think the problem in Russia today is not that Russians en masse condone this bestial aggression against Ukraine. That doesn’t exist like that,” said the Moscow sociologist Grigory Yudin shortly after the start of the Russian war of aggression. “The problem is that people are trying to pretend it’s none of their business, like they can just go about their private lives.”
Even a strengthening of Putin seems possible
But how is it to be explained that the Wagner mercenaries were cheered by Yevgeny Prigozhin during their uprising? “Politically and ideologically, Russia seems to be at such a dead end right now that even peace- and freedom-loving people look forward to anything that might bring them out of this impasse,” writes Alexander Baunov, former editor-in-chief of Carnegie.ru.
At the same time, Prigozhin is neither a lover of peace nor a lover of freedom: his mobilization program is even tougher than Putin’s. He therefore rates the flower pictures, which show a parallel to the pictures of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal in 1974, as “funny and terrible at the same time”. However, Baunow emphasizes that it was not masses who took to the streets in Rostov to support the insurgents.
>> Read here: “They will crush you” – Lukashenko describes a telephone conversation with the Wagner boss and criticizes Putin
According to Jens Siegert, former head of the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Russia office and still in Moscow, Putin could also regain strength after the weekend’s low. “There is much to suggest that things are going down rather than back up for Putin,” Siegert wrote on Twitter. “But that’s not impossible with clever politics. So the question is whether Putin can still do smart politics.” Putin’s problems have gotten significantly bigger, but they are not yet irreparable.
The exile medium Meduza also published some readers’ opinions that show uncertainty about the events of the weekend. An anonymous reader from Moscow writes that for him the quick end of the uprising had “no connection whatsoever with the way how quickly they advanced towards Moscow (without resistance) and how they were received by the Rostov population”.
The feeling remains “that we know no more than ten percent of the situation, which is unfortunately quite common in our government”.
National Guard should be better equipped
While Wagner Group recruitment posters were removed in many cities over the weekend, citizens in Vladivostok, in Russia’s Far East, hoisted a fabric banner that read “Vladivostok for Wagner.”
The population received the Wagner troops partly joyfully.
(Photo: IMAGO/SNA)
Pictures spread from Rostov-on-Don on social media, showing local residents distributing water to Wagner mercenaries, for example. The independent online magazine 7×7, which reports from Russia’s regions, quotes a Rostov resident as saying: “We do this out of the goodness of our hearts. Their faces look ailing, and we have good people.”
Such moments show how quickly the loyalty of the population can change. To prevent this, Putin has so far relied primarily on internal repression: propaganda, punitive measures and censorship – all of this has increased in Russia since the start of the large-scale war of aggression.
>> Read here: Is Prigozhin safe in Belarus? “As a KGB man, Putin will take revenge”
According to the human rights organization OVD-Info, more than 19,500 people have been arrested at anti-war protests since February 24, 2022. In the first nine months of the war of aggression alone, 117 people were prosecuted for “fakes” and 30 people for “discrediting the army”.
Now the National Guard, which reports directly to the President and is intended for domestic use, is to be strengthened. The nearly 340,000 National Guardsmen are equipped with heavy weapons and tanks.
Russian civil society must reckon that the ailing regime will do everything it can to nip even the faintest sign of dissent in the bud.
State media: Putin meets euphoric crowd
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