First modification:
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been drawing a political line for more than two decades that has marked the recent course of Russian history. Looking abroad, Putin has tried to return the historical geostrategic importance to Russia. Inside, on the other hand, Putin has shown himself to be an implacable president who has not hesitated to eliminate any type of opposition and the internal threats that Russia presented at the end of the 1990s.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been the most condemned political move in Vladimir Putin’s 22 years as head of Russia. A risky move by the Kremlin that can only be understood if you delve into his figure and the political line that the president has imposed on Russia at this time.
Vladimir Putin’s beginnings in politics are in the post-Soviet Russia of the 1990s. At that time the country was commanded by Boris Yeltsin and suffered a deep crisis. The fall of the USSR had brought economic difficulties, internal conflicts and a loss of prominence. It is here that, after a meteoric rise in Moscow, an unknown former KGB agent in East Germany, Vladimir Putin, became prime minister on August 9, 1999, and soon after replaced Yeltsin as president.
The war in Chechnya as a cover letter
His popularity grew exponentially with the start of the Second Chechen War. Newly arrived, Putin launched a military offensive against Chechen separatists against whom Moscow had lost a first war in 1995-96. The new offensive caused tens of thousands of civilian deaths and, finally, Grozny, his capital, came under pro-Russian control in early 2000.
At the end of 1999, Yeltsin resigned and Putin swept the presidential election that year. The political objective of his first term was to consolidate his internal power, along three lines: to control the Russian oligarchs and prevent their political interference, to marginalize any real opposition and to continue fighting the Chechen separatists.
Putin wanted to prevent Russia from becoming a new Yugoslavia and, although he supported the West at key moments, he began to draw a foreign policy line different from that of Yeltsin.
The turnaround in foreign policy
By the end of his term, in 2004, most internal challenges were under control and Putin was re-elected president. Then, the outer vision of him began to manifest.
His goal of consolidating the power of the Kremlin in the countries of the post-Soviet space was threatened by pro-Western movements, such as the Rose Revolution in Georgia or the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Events that Putin accused of being promoted by the West and that he classified as “foreign interference.” Beginning in 2005, his rhetoric toward NATO also hardened, accusing the United States of reneging on promises not to expand into Eastern Europe.
After a harsh speech against the United States and NATO at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, his intentions to protect Russia’s interests abroad became more apparent.
In 2008, it launched a war with Georgia on the grounds of protecting pro-Russian separatist governments in the Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions. By this time Putin had already ceased to be president due to the term limit and returned to being prime minister. Although his power in his shadow continued to take hold until his return to the presidency in 2012.
Upon his return to the Head of State, he had secured two terms of more than six years each. Meanwhile, the Baltic countries and several Eastern countries had joined NATO.
2014 as breaking point
2014 marked a break in Putin’s performance abroad. In February, a pro-Russian president in Ukraine was ousted by mass protests known as Euromaidan – which Russia claimed were financed by Western powers – and replaced by a nationalist, pro-European government.
Putin rejected Ukraine’s aspirations to move closer to the West. And he reacted by annexing Crimea, a Russian-majority Ukrainian region, after a referendum, and by giving military and economic support to separatists in Ukrainian Donbass, also populated mostly by Russians. The sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies did not make Putin back down.
However, his interventionsthey did not only focus on the post-Soviet space. They reached as far as Syria. In 2015, Putin entered this nation’s civil war on behalf of its president, Bashar al-Assad, a historic ally.
Russia had lost influence in recent decades in the Middle East and had seen how traditional allies, such as Saddam Hussein or Muammar al-Gaddafi, had fallen for Western interests. So she became fully involved in the defense role of the Syrian Government. A fundamental support that allowed Al-Assad to survive in power after years of war.
The case of Alexei Navalny
This international expansion has gone hand in hand with practically absolute internal control. In the last decade, his biggest challenger was the politician Alexei Navalny, whom he accused of being a Western agent and systematically persecuted. In 2020, the opponent presented symptoms of poisoning with Novichok, a nerve agent that the Russians have used on other occasions. Following his arrest in 2021, his voice has been virtually silenced.
Now, in his project to build what he calls “the new Russia”, Putin has denied the existence of Ukraine as a state and, alleging that it is run by “Nazis and drug addicts” and that it is part of “Russian historical space”, he has made the decision to invade it. Inside Russia, this is being presented as a “special military operation” and the few remaining independent media outlets in the country and several foreign outlets have been silenced by very restrictive legislation.
One last step –for now– that has placed Europe before the largest conflict and refugee crisis in its territory since the post-war period.