Angry Planet - What makes Vladimir Putin so special?

Episode Date: April 29, 2016

An economy in deep trouble. A scandal involving billions in off-shore bank accounts and shell companies. Seemingly endless military entanglements. Sounds like a recipe to bring down any world leader. This week, War College looks at what makes Russian President Vladimir Putin the ultimate special case.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. The oil price has definitely hitting the economy badly. But even the Kremlin is getting worried that actually it's beginning to project the possibility of disorder on the streets or elite conspiracies against the Kremlin, one thing or the other.

An economy in trouble, a scandal involving billions in offshore banks and shell companies, seemingly endless military entangleness. Sounds like a recipe to bring down any world leader. Today on War College, we'll look at what makes Russian President Vladimir Putin such a special case. You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a war. world in conflict focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here's your host, Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Reuters opinion editor, Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt, contributing editor with War is Boring. Today we're talking with Dr. Mark Galiati. He's an expert on

modern Russia. He's also a clinical professor of global affairs at New York University. Currently, he's a visiting fellow in Moscow with the European Council on Foreign Relations. Today, he's here to update us on the state of Russia and Vladimir Putin's government. Mark, thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. So I'm just going to start up with a very basic question. What kind of shape is Vladimir Putin's government in right now? Well, it looks pretty solid.

Vladimir Putin's own personality, approval ratings are up in the 80-something percent. But on the other hand, there is always the signs of some concern. The oil price is definitely hitting the economy badly, and that's really beginning to be felt seriously across the board. And we've just had the news that a new National Guard has been created out of existing public order forces, which is clearly going to be a Praetorian Guard force under a hand-picked crony of Putin's. And that suggests that even the Kremlin is getting worried that actually it's beginning to project the possibility of disorder on the streets or elite conspiracies against the Kremlin, one thing or the other. So wait, is that only inside Moscow or is it something that's being organized in a national way?

Oh, it's national. Essentially, what it is, it takes the interior troops of the Interior Ministry, which were a force of about 170,000 paramilitary security forces, and as to them the Amon, who are the riot police, and Sober, who are sort of the kind of SWAT teams. So essentially all the guys who were responsible for public order being taken out of the Interior Ministry, in part because the Interior Minister himself is a career cop called Kolokov, who clearly regards his job as being a cop rather than a headbreaker and then being put into a separate specialist unit or force, the National Guard,

under Zolotov, who was Putin's former head of personal security. And this is actually going to be national. Again, this is one of the differences by also bringing in police elements. It means that there will now be National Guard at a much lower level in smaller towns than the old Interior Ministry troops who were. So this is definitely a nationwide security force. How does it compare with the militia as it was set up in the Soviet Union, which was sort of the cops and paramilitary in?

Essentially, the structures have been basically kept the same. I mean, it's interesting if you want to look so that the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the M. Vedr, is actually something that has moved from, it was a Tsarist institution, it became a Soviet institution, and then it became a post-Soviet institution, with actually strikingly little change in some ways. They changed the militia to being called the police as part of the reforms under the presidency of Dmitri Medvedev,

who was a little bit more liberal, but more to the point much more of a legal approach to things. He wanted to sort of make everything more legally square. And to be honestly, the regular police are actually much, much more recognisably cops than anything else. They become, on the whole, more professionalised. They're not about political control. But these forces we're talking about, the interior troops, which are now going to be part of the National Guard, I mean, they're very different.

I mean, they definitely were just as under the Soviet times. Their job is to keep the population in check. That's what they're trained for. That's what they're equipped for. That's what they're recruited for. When you say keep the population in check, what does that look like on the street? What are these guys actually doing out there? Well, I mean, the interior troops, we don't see very much on the streets normally. They are a barracked militarized force.

You see them, and they're usually at things like football matches, political demonstrations and so forth. When push comes to shove, though, first of all, these can be deployed as riot police, so-called cosmonauts because of the way they look in their bubble helmets and everything else. But they also, I mean, they are fully paramilitarised in the sense of they are essentially equipped as light infantry. We've seen the interior troops. They were, for example, deployed in Chechnya, where they actually, sort of. carried out in the second war much of the majority of the fighting we still see them operating in a counterinsurgency role in the North Caucasus more generally so they basically cover a full spectrum from riot police duties with rubber

truncheons all the way through to all-out counterinsurgency and the whole point is most of the operational units are precisely configured so that they can do anything along that spectrum so in a way You can deploy them as riot cops, but then if, and I think this is incredibly unlikely, you get the sort of protest movement that arises as happened in Ukraine, they can just as easily be reconfigured as much more sort of violent and vicious forces. And as you said, they now are reporting more or less directly up into the Kremlin. Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is the key thing.

I mean, there's no new bodies being added to the roster. The point is they're being taken out of the Interior Ministry where there was an additional layer of command. And now they, under Zolotov, they report directly to the government. They're an independent agency, which basically means there is no one to say, hang on there, if the Kremlin decides that someone's head needs breaking. Mark, you said this is a sign that Moscow might be worried. I'm curious why Moscow might be worried right now. Well, this is the interesting thing.

I mean, there are clearly some future issues to be concerned about. And you've got to remember, a force like this, you don't stand up overnight. I mean, the laws have to be passed. Well, since Putin's proposed it, we know it's going to pass. I think there's any real question about that. But just simply actually, just simply, the transfer of forces to this new command will take a while to be properly stood up. The first thing people are looking at is in September there are elections to the Duma, the legislature. And again, although this is not exactly going to be a cliffhanging election, in the sense of who wins, we know it's going to be Putin's party.

The thing is, to get the kind of results that they need to demonstrate, give the appearance of massive legitimacy, they're almost certainly going to have to rig the vote. And we've seen in the past that particularly blatant vote rigging did actually lead to a series of protests called the Vallottnaya protests. So that is one possibility. Possibility number two is labour unrest. We're seeing a growing tide of labour unrest as people's conditions of living get worse and worse and worse. And although at the moment it's wildcat, short sort of short duration, little pinpricks here and there, there is the possibility. And the interesting thing is actually the police have already sort of basically expressed some reservations about being used against labour unrest.

They're saying, look, unless these people are actually getting violent, this is not our job to disrupt these kind of protests. So maybe that might have been another impulse for creating this new structure. Then next year we have the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. And although Putin is going to want to sort of not really celebrate a communist revolution, the Communist Party is. So it would be interesting to see what that is. And then in 2018, we have presidential elections. So this is basically a period in which we have a sort of a two-year political season

of increasing importance at a time when actually, since the Russian economy is not going to, to improve dramatically overnight or even over the next couple of years, actually in which people, quality of life is going to be slipping and slipping and slipping. But all that said, I really don't see any signs of any kind of mass protests at the moment. And therefore, for me, one of the most striking things about this move and the most worrying is what it says about the mood of the Kremlin. We know that in some ways Putin has become more and more insulated from Russian day-to-day life, more and more is now only listening to a very small handful of people

of a similar authoritarian and ultra-nationalist bent. And therefore, it's not so much about whether the country is really right for protest. It's whether the Kremlin is starting to slip into a form of paranoia that they think that actually protests, plots and so forth are abounding. Oh, boy, so when you say that about Russia and you say about the Kremlin, that's particularly terrifying because of course they're very familiar with that in Russian history, right?

I mean, you have, I mean, the communist era where the Kremlin was very cut off and people suffered in the millions. Well, yes, I mean, we're not talking about that. We're not heading for some new Stalinism or whatever. It's more that I just, my concern is that,

and in some ways this actually echoes what we see with Russia's moves outside the country as well, that when you have an elite that really doesn't have a good sense of what's going on in the real world and is perhaps prone to seeing conspiracies against it, it's much more likely to overreact. Just as if it's being fed comforting lies, which I think is also one of the problems, it's much more likely to think that it's stronger and more powerful and has more freedom of maneuver than it really has, and therefore we can actually get stupid and dangerous decisions being made. Well, talking about

that insularity actually comes in very nicely with what just came out in these Panama papers, right? What was amazing is we find out that a cellist has done remarkably well for himself and the tunes of billions of dollars. The cellist, I'm sure, is very, very talented, but is also Vladimir Putin's best friend, is that, is correct? Yeah, certainly sort of one-of and godfather to one of his daughters and so forth, yes. Yes, I mean, but again, I think, you know, this is. This is one of the interesting things. When the Panama Papers first splashed, clearly the big story was Putin, whose actual name isn't in any of these papers, but nonetheless it's fairly clear. His fingerprints are very clearly all over it. The Putin story was the one that got the news because, yes, it's all about $2 billion being salted away, particularly through this cellist, Rolduggen. Not much of a splash here, though. And that's not just because of media control and so forth, though, obviously the papers did. or the TV media, which is all under government control, did very much minimize it. But because it didn't really tell us anything we didn't know.

It told us detail. It told us perhaps exactly which company and which person was being used and gave us a certain sort of fun-titivating appeal there. But it's not news to anybody that there's massive levels of embezzlement. Not so much because I think Putin himself is building up a Swiss bank account or a Panamanian bank account. I think he's one of these figures who actually power is his thing rather than money. But money is almost a symptom of his power.

And therefore, this is the interesting thing that the Panama Papers prove that Russia is deeply corrupt and run by an embezzling kleptocracy, just as they might also prove that the Pope is Catholic. So I was going to say, if you're... you're Putin and you're more interested in control than you are money, you still need money in order to buy that control, right? I mean, you have to have favors to dole out. This is it. I mean, I think in this respect, what happens is that sort of money, money is in some ways almost the symptom and the symbol of power. If you are an oligarch, the way you get money is by being granted state contracts that you then use to, you know, embezzle and rip off. And you know,

you generally kick a certain amount back and what that kind of creates is a slush fund that is used. Now Putin himself doesn't tend to use that. When Putin wanted to build himself a palace, he basically just diverted some money that had been gained for the health service to build himself a palace. When he wanted a yacht, he got an oligarch to give him a yacht. You know, Putin is not someone who needs money these days. But on the other hand, there are so many people around him for whom money is important. But when it comes down to it, as I said, the key thing is that the currency of Russia is power. If you are vastly rich in Russia today, you are vastly rich in Russia today. You could well be poor or imprisoned tomorrow if the state decides to go against you.

But on the other hand, if you're powerful in Russia today, you can monetize that without any problem. So this is why the money is almost just the sort of the slush fund and the representation of the power that actually surrounds people. and those whom Putin blesses. And I guess it's also incredibly obvious just how off the books it all is. I mean, forget Vladimir Putin's being given a yacht, but even smaller things that are just so blatant. For example, the spokesman, I'm sorry I forgot in his name, but who was wearing a $650,000 watch and of course has a state salary of 100,000 or less, right? It's just, it's all right out there.

Do you find that people that you've spoken to who are not part of the structure, do they mind? Or do they think that this is just what's supposed to happen? In some ways, this is what's so phenomenally depressing. No one has any illusions about the corruption of everyone within the system. But I think what's happened is essentially that there's been this decay of the kind of imagination that suggests that things could be otherwise. I think for many Russians, corruption is like the weather. You don't get a say in it. You just have to endure it. And it's something that people get annoyed about. But when they get annoyed about, it's not actually about the spokesman

with the half a million dollar watch or whatever. Or, I mean, again, there was a fascinating case of the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, who was photographed with, again, some ludicously expensive watch on his wrist. And then they clumsily airbrushed it out, but they forgot to airbrush it off the shiny table at which he was sitting so that it was still clearly visible. That kind of thing offended people, but not so much because of the watch, but because people had, basically such a clumsy attempt had been made to cover up. Russians expect their leaders to be corrupt. What bugs them is the corruption that is actually visible to them. The fire inspector who comes to your shop and because you need to have his signature he will extort

money from you. The traffic cop who flags you down and claims that you are speeding and you know that it's just simply a moment of exhaustion. That kind of thing, the stuff that's really in their face people are resisted about. But I do feel that this is the Putin regime's Achilles heel. We've had attempts at protest movements before that try to mobilize corruption. What no one has yet managed to do is really reach out to the Russian people and say, you know the issues that really matter to you. Your kid's school that has not been rebuilt, the street outside that should have been resurfaced. That is not just because of someone in the mayor's office, but it's because of a whole system that

goes all the way to the Kremlin. No one's managed to kind of make that connection. And the interesting thing is at the moment, it's actually the Communist Party, which up to now has been very tame and very much happy to be the sort of force opposition, which is beginning to make a bit a fuss about that. I don't know if that's going to come to anything or not. But I think this is the issue. All Russians are unhappy with corruption. No one believes that anything can be done about it, and therefore why complain? Who, just in case it comes up again in our next few years, who's the current leader of the Communist Party in Russia? The current leader is a chap by name Genadi Zyuganov. He is definitely not someone who is going to be raising the red

flag and storming the barricades. I mean, he basically is bought and paid for. in the sense that he has accepted this role as being the fake opposition leader. And he goes up and he huffs and he puffs every now and then. But frankly, if he was offered power, I suspect he'd run a mile. But the point is, there is a changing move within the Communist Party grassroots. It used to be very much the Communist Party who was basically made up of Stalinist grandmothers. It was a sort of a dying demographic. But you're now getting a new bunch of people in their 20s and their 30s

for whom this is just the sort of, if you want to join a party that is a opposition to the government. The communists are basically the only group in town. So they're not necessarily communist. They don't read Marx and Lenin or anything like that. But I think these are what's pushing the Central Communist Party leadership into getting a little bit more aggressive. But I can't help feeling that Zyuganov himself would much rather a quiet life. But it's interesting enough when you actually see him at press conferences these days, he's often flanked by much younger figures. And I almost want to see if some of them with his arm twisted behind his back.

Just changing the subject a little bit, we're talking about the money in private hands. There was something I read this morning about how Russia is actually reaching close to the end of their reserves, meaning that by 2017, you know, they're running into deficit in the budget, you don't have the energy wealth to plug the gap. Do you think that there's real trouble on the horizon as far as actually paying for the government goes? Not really. Yes, there are real challenges. I mean, Russia itself is not running out of money, the country. I mean, there's still a fair amount of money.

Ironically enough, the ruble tumbling in value because of the oil price fall has in some ways actually been a help because it's allowed them to pay off a certain amount of debts and things a lot more easily. But on the other hand, absolutely, this is affecting the government's tax base. And although they have brought in cuts across the board, including to the security apparatus and including to the military, which

up to now have always been the sacred cows, which were protected even, for example, in 2008 when there was the last major financial crisis for Russia. Still, that's not enough. What they're having to do is obviously make more cuts, but also do things like plundering the pension funds. What they're basically doing is that they have been burning through their Rainy Day Reserve Fund. And that's pretty much gone.

They've already had to raid the pension funds for spending money on Crimea. So that's what's going on. But, I mean, exactly. There is a limit to how long they can do that. They're not going to run out of money, but they are going to run out of the ability to spend like they're spending now. And so this is why tough choices are going to have to be made. So I think this might be a related question.

You could tell me because maybe it isn't a related question. but Russia, Vladimir Putin made a very dramatic announcement about pulling back from Syria. You wrote a terrific column for us at Reuters, sort of explaining why it would be that they would pull some of their weaponry out. I mean, is that related to economics? And also, there are now reports that maybe the pullout wasn't as large scale as originally thought. Well, Syria was always, frankly, a pretty cheap operation. It was really quite, quite strikingly small, after all. I mean, it's amazing how 30 planes can not only change the course of a war,

but also break the West's determination to try and diplomatically isolate Russia. I mean, in that respect, it was actually one has to give the devil his due. I mean, quite quite a brilliant political as much as military operation. But as I said, it was relatively cheap, quite small, a lot of what they'd be doing, I mean, they would have been doing much the same in training exercises and so forth. The Russians are training really quite extensive. been hard these days. And so what they've done is, I mean, they have drawn down their forces, but they've also

reconfigured them. They've taken out their Sequo 25 ground attack planes, and they put in a lot more attack helicopters, which are really more fitting for the kind of urban operations that sort of the next phase of the war involves, where you're actually going to have to be sort of, you know, flying ops quite close to the front line, you know, put drawing up. dropping ordnance close to your advancing forces. What they have done though is they pulled out a lot of their ground troops. They had been a slow creep up of ground forces including artillery.

Originally they had ground forces just some special troops, special forces and basically protection elements for their air base. And bit by bit they'd moved in a little bit more, they'd had some tanks, then they sort put in some artillery and when you've got artillery you've got to have some infantry to support them and that kind of thing. Bit by bit, that was creeping up at nothing. And this is what they pulled out. And in part they replaced them with mercenaries.

There is a Russian private military company called Wagner, which is actually fighting on the front line. And it's clear that this is just a bit of denial of sleight of hand, because actually private military companies are not allowed under Russian law. But the point is this is clearly being set up by the government to put in Russian forces so that essentially when people start coming home in Zing boxes and dozens of them, they're have, it doesn't appear in the official casualty rate. So what we have seen is a slight reduction in the forces, a reconfiguration of the forces, and a substitution of official troops with some

mercenaries. But no, I mean, none of this is really for financial reasons. All right, Mark, you've updated us about Syria, but what about Ukraine? What's going on there right now? It's still a real mess, and I think it's a mess for several reasons. It's a mess in part because I don't think the Russians have actually yet got a strategy. They know what they would like to happen. But since that, which is in other words, essentially Kiev bending the knee and finally acknowledging that they're part of Russia's sphere of influence isn't happening and frankly isn't going to happen,

not least because the government is just too weak. I mean, even if actually President Poroshenko wanted to do that, there's no way he could push that through. So I think the Russians are in this strategic question. wandering. And so every now and then they slightly escalate the fighting and other times they draw it down. The Minsk II peace agreement, which is always a deeply flawed to the point of dangerously stupid agreement, isn't going to get anywhere. It is not going to be applied. And therefore we just have to have to get used to that idea and whether there's going to be a Minsk 3 or not. Who knows?

But the trouble is, I think the thing is there's two conflicts going on. One is within Russia. an idea of what do we want to try and do with the Donbass. But also, they're not absolutely in control. A lot of the rebel groups have their own opinions, are often badly controlled. And sometimes, I mean, I think we've seen fighting, some of the fighting around the town of Yivka, which is controlled by the Ukrainians,

but it's one of the obvious sort of flashpoints. I'm not convinced that actually Moscow started that fighting. I think that was actually started by local militias, basically wanting to force Moscow into a more aggressive positioning. As a counterpoint to what we were saying about the Panama papers earlier, I wanted to ask about Ukraine's Prime Minister. He just resigned. Would you walk us through why he resigned?

Well, firstly, because, I mean, there's probably no more unpopular figure in Ukraine at the moment than Yatsynuk. I say outgoing Prime Minister. as of today when we were recording this, Parliament was unable to actually get a vote through accepting his resignation. So although everyone knows he's going to have to go, even that the Ukrainian Parliament has not been able to actually sort of pass yet, which unfortunately says something about the status of Ukrainian politics.

I mean, he had to go because, well, for a variety of reasons. One is, you know, he clearly, whether it's simply because, or weakness, whether it's because he was in hock to the oligarchs or whatever, he had made some moves in terms of reforming the economic structures enough to be able to get certain IMF funds. But basically, Ukraine is still waiting for the reforms which were at the heart of the Maidan protests. And in so many ways, Yatsynuk actually turned out to be the obstacle to that. So, you know, in a way, he had become politically hugely, you know, great liability. Secondly, President Poroshenko is now in a position to try and basically put in one of his own cronies

as the new Prime Minister Groiseman. And again, I mean, I think this demonstrates the extent to which Poroshenko is, who we should also mention, was in the Panama Papers himself, having said that he would divest himself of his assets and, in fact, just simply slid it off to, offshore. Something that the that is a bit of news that the Russian media has been heavily playing surprisingly enough but I think this is in some ways you know Yatsyn York has been a convenient scapegoat in that respect the thing is at the moment we see the Ukrainian political class deeply divided and essentially an

anti-reform element within it that is out of step with the country as a whole is still able to if not dominate the political system but block any attempts at meaningful change. And the problem is that actually is leading to disillusion on one side and a building up of pressure on the other. You've got new political movements, particularly one that's actually backed by former Georgian president, now governor of Adessa, Sakashvili, which is clearly talking about seriously attacking corruption. The problem is that to seriously attack corruption is essentially to declare war on the dominant political elite. So in some ways, Yatsinyuk's departure is just business as usual.

It's just going to be a reshuffling of an existing governmental elite. But on another level, it says something about, I think, the increasing instability of this political situation. I understand, Mark, that this may be our last conversation with you as a New York University professor. Is that correct? Well, I have a few more months yet on the NYU payroll. I'm glad to say. Thank you very much, NYU. you. Then after, yes, come August, I'm relocating to Prague, where I'm setting up, I'm still in

conversations with a few places, but also, but essentially to concentrate more on writing and research. And given for the things that I research, I really need to be in Russia, because for some strange reason, people don't want to chat about crime or security services on the phone or by internet. It'll also be a lot easier for me to be close to my body of research. Do you have any idea what the next book might be? Well, there is, I should mention an Osprey book on the modern Russian army. That's actually just at the moment of being finished. There is a book on a history of Russian organized crime that's a little bit further in the pipeline.

And then there is another big project, but I'll keep that close to my chair, so gives you an excuse to invite me back in the future. As if we needed one. Mark Aliati, thank you very, very much. My great pleasure. Thanks for listening to War College. I wanted to take a minute to address a grave sin of omission. I've never thanked the people who make this show possible but aren't on the air.

Craig Heedek developed the show with me and was its producer for months. Bethel Hapti took over his producer a few months ago, and if our audio quality made to jump after that, she's the one to blame. One last thing. Next up is a guest episode from Reuters' own Jamila Knowles. She and guest Stephen Gray will be talking about spying. Forget James Bond, forget Kim Filby. We learn about the real men and women doing the dirty work.