HS Analysis | Putin faces an increasingly strong opposition, and it comes from the extreme right

Russian presidential Vladimir Putin Wednesday’s decree on the partial suspension of the movement looks like a compromise dictated by necessity in Russia’s domestic politics with a group demanding a full-scale war.

Since February, this group has been called the “war party” in Russia, as its representatives have considered Russia’s “special operation” in Ukraine to be completely insufficient to restore Russia’s greatness.

The importance and demands of the group have grown at least since last April. After the liberal opposition disappeared into hiding, in prison or abroad, the “war party” has remained almost the only opponent of Putin in Russia

The mouthpieces of the “war party” are politicians, journalists and former soldiers who publish their positions daily on social media. The demands are sometimes bloodthirsty and demands for the use of nuclear weapons are not uncommon.

Next in the comments, the representatives of the “war party” did not exactly praise Putin’s partial motion.

The most visible representative of the group, a former intelligence officer and a veteran of the war in Eastern Ukraine Igor Girkin considered the recruitment of 300,000 new soldiers sufficient to hold Russia’s current lines but not to advance. At the same time, he suspected that reservists would not be able to assemble nearly the announced number.

“There is no need to launch a full motion, it would be excessive, financially burdensome and would lead to chaos and increased tensions,” commented Girkin For NSN news. “But sending a million or at least several hundred thousand soldiers to the front is necessary.”

Girkin condemned the prisoner exchange between Ukraine and Russia announced on Thursday as “treason” on his Telegram channel.

Even the most positive ones opinions were raised by a partial proposal in the group.

“Of course there will be more than 300,000 fighters”, volunteer fighter and blogger Maxim Fomin alias Vladlen Tatarski rejoiced on his YouTube channel. “Who would tell the real number on television!”

Journalist and writer Yegor Holmogorov had to again on his Telegram channel business promotion as Putin’s game.

“The mobilization is above all a gesture by the Kremlin to show the domestic audience that the way to negotiations is open on the Kremlin’s own terms,” ​​Holmogorov estimates. “But the referendums in Ukraine show that Herson and Melitopol are no longer pawns on the negotiating table. Recognizing the ‘borders of Kherson’ is Russia’s minimum requirement.”

According to Holmogorov, with the same campaign, Ukraine will be shown that its fortunes in the war will turn around when the new troops are at the front. “And Ukraine will lose, don’t doubt it.”

Bloodthirsty the extreme right has a surprising meaning also for the public in the West and Ukraine.

The group’s representatives have good relations with both the defense administration and the armed forces, and the group’s representatives have shared up-to-date information about frontline incidents on social media, without censorship or slander.

For example, the positions of Girkin alias Igor Strelkov can be found in, for example, the Ukrainian state news agency On Unian’s YouTube channel. This despite the fact that Girkin is a wanted terrorist in Ukraine. In his statements, Girkin-Strelkov has predicted, among other things, Russia’s crushing defeat in the war and the assassination of President Putin.

For the war party the demands of the appointed nationalist right to increase the troops in Ukraine began to gain momentum in April, when Russia was forced to withdraw from the northern front of Ukraine.

The next turning point was a journalist representing the nationalist right Darja Duginan murder in Moscow at the end of August, wrote the professor To Marlene Larue newspaper in The New York Times on Thursday. Dugina was a prominent figure of the “war party” and a conservative ideologue Aleksandr Duginin daughter.

“The impact of the murder was clear,” Laruelle assessed. “Since then, the war party has used Dugina’s ‘martyr’ status to their advantage when demanding a full-scale war with increasing volume.”

Ukraine’s successful counter-offensive in the Kharkiv region gave the war party the next dose of support. “We used to think Girkin was a clown, but do we anymore,” the fighters of the mercenary company Wagner shouted on the Telegram channel.

“War Party” is not a party or a movement, but a group or network of like-minded people, and it is not unified. However, it is significantly more united than the pro-Western liberal opposition, which has been silenced many times.

Emphasizing the traditions of tsarist Russia, authoritarian rule, imperialist grandeur and orthodox religion, and strongly opposing both liberalism and pluralism, the group has influenced Russian politics since the 1990s. The opposition to the money-rich and corruption is in the same mix, and Girkin has also become a kind of “imperialist Alexei Navalny“.

It is therefore a free-form network representing radical nationalism, which includes representatives from the security services, the defense forces and the military industry, political movements and the media.

The most well-known media devoted to the idea are Aleksandr Prokhanov editor-in-chief of the newspaper Zavtra and a monarchist businessman Alexander Malofeev owned by media group Tsargrad.

It happened Whatever happens in the war in Ukraine, the “war party” will not lose anything from Russia after the war.

Investigative reporter for the Russian Meduza news website based in Latvia Alexei Kovalev evaluates in his writing Foreign Policy – magazine, that instead of Ukraine or the West, the members of the “war party” consider the Russians, whom they consider traitors, to be their worst enemies.

“They create a fantasy world where the all-powerful Russian army is defeated by domestic enemies instead of soldiers and modern weapons defending their homeland in Ukraine,” Kovalev writes. “Therefore, this move could have damaging effects on post-war and possibly post-Putin Russia.”

“Their story actually sounds very similar Dolchstosslegende, the backstabbing theory,” Kovaljov continues. “So the conspiracy theory, which blamed Germany’s defeat in the First World War on cunning enemies on the home front, including Jews. This story became a central part of the propaganda that brought the Nazis to power.”