8 April — Russia, the New Not Normal, and Putin’s Reality Gap

We have entered a very interesting period, which I would call the new not normal. Russian Federation troops are advancing, sort of, overtaking small communities in the east that, frankly, aren’t really worth dying for. But the idea that they could march from Avdiivka to Lviv still seems farfetched and the Ukrainian State is not going anywhere, no matter how much historical mumbo jumbo Putin coats his landgrab in. Actually, large swaths of the Russian Federation used to belong to the Kievan Rus. Ukraine has the same right to Russia’s territory, if we’re going to have this rather stupid argument.

Putin pulled off his “reelection.” With Navalny, and Prigozhin, deceased, who else could take the reins from this guy? And yet he’s wanted by the International Criminal Court for deporting children, and that warrant isn’t going to go away. He is an alleged, at least until trialed, war criminal. So we live in this odd situation, where on one hand, there is a new kind of stability. A war slowly burns on, with marginal territorial changes, Putin remains in power and isolated from the West, but also, there’s no resolution in sight. So Putin’s reign itself has become a new frozen conflict.

This could remain the new not normal for years to come.

I think Russia does not understand how the West functions because of the way its own institutions function. Russia works in such a way that the ruler decides something and the institutions work to make it look legitimate. Putin decides and they amend the Constitution so that it looks like it’s legal. In the West, institutions are independent of individuals. Emmanuel Macron can’t make the ICC rescind its warrant for Putin. Rishi Sunak sure as hell can’t either. Joe Biden can’t even make Netanyahu stop his war. And he is, or was, a client of the United States. There is no ruler yielding total power who can just make things, like an ICC warrant, disappear. Putin’s great orange hope, Donald Trump, is in continuous legal peril. He can’t do it either. And their friend Orban in Budapest is facing vast demonstrations. Orban has to look European enough to maintain his access to EU money. He can’t “pull a Yanukovich” and send out his troops to fire on protestors.

Or can he?

This inability to understand the West is at times amusing to watch. The Russian ambassador to Finland’s recent remarks over its NATO membership are somehow pathetic. Finland abandoned its independent foreign policy by joining NATO, he claimed. They still haven’t digested this yet and, I’m afraid, see Finnish NATO membership as temporary or “not real.” But since when has any country’s NATO membership been temporary? Estonia joined NATO way back in 2004. Finnish and Swedish NATO membership completely altered all of the narratives around Russia’s entitlement to control countries that were once part of the Soviet Union.

The entire narrative shaping Putin’s policies towards his neighbors makes absolutely no sense anymore in this context. It’s really simple: in the Soviet revanchist daydream, Finland and Sweden were supposed to be neutral when Russian tanks rolled into Riga one day to replace the “nationalist” government there. All history books will be rewritten to praise the Soviet military and Vladimir Putin, a friend to everyone in these countries he’s never been to. Russia has spent decades painting these countries as “Nazis,” and the West was supposed to have misgivings about them and look the other way when Putin moved in to do to Latvia what he’s doing to Ukraine at the moment. Now they are obliged by a defense pact to defend Latvia. That can’t be right. They’ll have to undo their NATO membership.

This is the main issue that Putin’s government is facing: the reality gap. On Russian TV, he looks as entrenched and as resolute as ever. Outside of that bubble, he’s got an international arrest warrant out for him, can’t travel much, and his best friends are basically other criminals. Including Trump. So there is a built-in rigidness to the Russian system that, in the end, will cause it to fail. It’s based around vertical control by one individual. In the West, we can replace our leaders and they can adjust their policies. In Russia they cannot do this. The only way Putin can do this is by firing someone and blaming the failures of the state on that person, not himself.

But that’s just how things are.

For the ego and riches of one man, all of these people had to die.