In a comment on my recent article “Feedback from My Contacts in Russia,” which also was cross-posted at Medium.com, writer Dan Kadlec told me in response to my mention of the thousands of Russians who’d been hurt by the closing of western businesses in their home country: “I have been meeting some of these folks in Dubai.” Below are some excerpts from his article.– Natylie
….Much is written about where Russian oligarchs are parking their superyachts and Gulfstream jets under threat of sanctions from the west. Dubai is one of those places. With a lot of Russian money, the yacht-building industry here has doubled the past eight years, and in recent weeks yacht traffic between Bluewaters and Palm Jumeirah in Dubai Harbor has felt like the Long Island Expressway at rush hour. Clashing wakes from floating 250-foot behemoths toss novice jet skiers like dinghies in a hurricane.
But ordinary Russians are on the move too. The families and the reuniting couple I saw were not oligarchs — and they were not on vacation. They were among the estimated 200,000 working-class folks who fled to Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. Much of the UAE flow has been into Dubai. Demand has been so strong that one-way coach air fare from Moscow has risen five-fold to $1,800.
I continue to encounter Russian emigres and speak to them when it feels appropriate. In the elevator, I commented on a small poodle that a middle-aged man was about to take for a walk. I’m big on elevator convos; I enjoy interacting with strangers and have largely perfected the timing and how to graciously butt into someone’s life. But this man was in no mood. He mumbled something in Russian without making eye contact. I knew that my gregariousness had failed and that his mind was heavy and far away.
“Oh yeah,” a little voice in my head said. “Not everyone here is on a holiday.”
….The Russian refugees I have encountered are still in shock and largely reluctant to share details. In my limited sampling, their livelihoods had been tied to western companies with offices in Moscow that shut down with little warning. The lucky ones were given 48 hours to accept a ticket out, leaving almost everything they owned behind. Some hope to return one day.
Dimitri, a young man, left his mother and father behind. With no time to think the matter through, he hopped the next flight believing this nightmare would pass soon enough and he could go back to them. Yet hundreds of international companies are preparing for permanent shutdown. At last count, 159 western companies had made a clean break from Russia while 182 had suspended all operations and may never resume.
When might Dimitri go home? Possibly never.
Alina and Ivan have two young children. But they only had a passport for one, so the other child stayed behind with grandparents. They didn’t know what else to do and had no time to consider their options. Their days are now consumed with searching for a path to reunite the family — whatever it takes. These are heartbreaking stories to hear first-hand…
I have generally found Anatol Lieven to be a good analyst on Russia issues. I will withhold my opinion on this particular article for the moment, but think people should read it. Let me know your thoughts in the comments section. – Natylie
In describing Vladimir Putin and his inner circle, I have often thought of a remark by John Maynard Keynes about Georges Clemenceau, French prime minister during the first world war: that he was an utterly disillusioned individual who “had one illusion — France”.
Something similar could be said of Russia’s governing elite, and helps to explain the appallingly risky collective gamble they have taken by invading Ukraine. Ruthless, greedy and cynical they may be — but they are not cynical about the idea of Russian greatness.
The western media employ the term “oligarch” to describe super-wealthy Russians in general, including those now wholly or largely resident in the west. The term gained traction in the 1990s, and has long been seriously misused. In the time of President Boris Yeltsin, a small group of wealthy businessmen did indeed dominate the state, which they plundered in collaboration with senior officials. This group was, however, broken by Putin during his first years in power.
Three of the top seven “oligarchs” tried to defy Putin politically. Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky were driven abroad, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky was jailed and then exiled. The others, and their numerous lesser equivalents, were allowed to keep their businesses within Russia in return for unconditional public subservience to Putin. When Putin met (by video link) leading Russian businessmen after launching the invasion of Ukraine, there was no question of who was giving the orders.
The force that broke the oligarchs was the former KGB, reorganised in its various successor services. Putin himself, of course, came from the KGB, and a large majority of the top elite under Putin are from the KGB or associated state backgrounds (though not the armed forces).
This group have remained remarkably stable and homogenous under Putin, and are (or used to be) close to him personally. Under his leadership, they have plundered their country (though unlike the previous oligarchs, they have kept most of their wealth within Russia) and have participated or acquiesced in his crimes, including the greatest of them all, the invasion of Ukraine. They have echoed both Putin’s vicious propaganda against Ukraine and his denunciations of western decadence.
As Russia plunges deeper into a military quagmire and economic crisis, a central question is whether — if the war is not ended quickly by a peace settlement — Putin can be removed (or persuaded to step down) by the Russian elites themselves, in order to try to extricate Russia and themselves from the pit he has dug for them. To assess the chances of this requires an understanding of the nature of the contemporary Russian elites, and above all of Putin’s inner core.
By way of illustrating the depth of the Russian catastrophe of the 1990s and identifying with all those who suffered from it, Putin has said that at one stage he was reduced — while still a serving lieutenant colonel of the KGB — to moonlighting as a freelance taxi driver in order to supplement his income. This is plausible enough. In 1994, while I was working as a journalist for The Times in Russia and the former USSR, my driver in the North Caucasus was an ex-major in the KGB. “We thought we were the backbone of the Soviet Union,” he said to me bitterly. “Now look at us. Real Chekists!”
“Real Chekist” (nastoyashchy chekist) was a Soviet propaganda phrase referring to the qualities of ruthless discipline, courage, ideological commitment and honesty supposedly characteristic of the Cheka, the first Soviet secret police formed by Lenin and his associates. It became the subject of many Soviet jokes, but there is little doubt that Putin and his top elite continue to see themselves in this light, as the backbone of Russia — though Putin, who is anything but a revolutionary, appears to identify much more strongly with the security elites of imperial Russia.
An interesting illustration of this comes from Union of Salvation (Soyuz Spaseniya, 2019), a film about the radical Decembrist revolt of 1825, made with the support of the Russian state. To the considerable shock of older Russian friends of mine who were brought up to revere the Decembrists, the heroes of this film are Tsar Nicholas I and the loyal imperial generals and bureaucrats who fought to preserve government and order against the rebels.
Although they have amassed immense power and wealth, Putin and his immediate circle remain intensely resentful of the way in which the Soviet Union, Russia and their own service collapsed in the 1990s — and great power mixed with great resentment is one of the most dangerous mixtures in both domestic and international politics.
As Putin’s autocratic tendencies have grown, real power (as opposed to wealth) within the system has come to depend more and more on continual personal access to the president; and the number of those with such access has narrowed — especially since the Covid pandemic led to Putin’s drastic physical isolation — to a handful of close associates.
Five of Putin’s inner circle
Sergei Lavrov, 71, foreign minister
Sergei Naryshkin, 67, foreign intelligence chief
Nikolai Patrushev, 70, secretary of Russia’s security council
Igor Sechin, 61, chief executive of Rosneft
Sergei Shoigu, 66, defence minister
In his first years in power, Putin (who was a relatively junior KGB officer) could be regarded as “first among equals” in a top elite of friends and colleagues. No longer. Increasingly, even the siloviki have been publicly reduced to servants of the autocrat — as was graphically illustrated by Putin’s humiliation of his foreign intelligence chief, Sergei Naryshkin, at the televised meeting of the National Security Council on the eve of war. Such contemptuous behaviour towards his immediate followers could come back to bite Putin, as it has so many past autocrats.
The inner core includes defence minister Sergei Shoigu (former emergencies minister and not a professional soldier); Nikolai Patrushev, former head of domestic intelligence and now secretary of Russia’s National Security Council; Naryshkin; and Igor Sechin, the former deputy prime minister appointed by Putin to run the Rosneft oil company. Insofar as top economic officials with “patriotic liberal” leanings were ever part of this inner core, they have long since been excluded.
These men are known in Russia as the “siloviki” — “men of force”, or perhaps even, in the Irish phrase, “hard men”. A clear line should be drawn between the siloviki and the wider Russian elites — large and very disparate and disunited congeries of top businessmen, senior officials outside the inner circle, leading media figures, top generals, patriotic intellectuals and the motley crew of local notables, placemen and fixers who make up the leadership of Putin’s United Russia party.
Among some of the wider Russian elites, unease at the invasion of Ukraine and its consequences is already apparent. Naturally enough, this has begun with the economic elites, given their deep stakes in business with the west and their understanding of the catastrophic impact of western sanctions on the Russian economy. Roman Abramovich, his discomfort clear enough as he sought buyers for Chelsea Football Club, found the sale halted this week when his UK assets were frozen. Mikhail Fridman, chairman of Alfa Group (already severely hit by western sanctions) and one of the surviving former “oligarchs” from the 1990s, has called for an early end to the war, as has aluminium magnate Oleg Deripaska.
If there is no peace agreement and the war drags on into a bloody stalemate, the economy declines precipitously and the Russian people see a steep fall in their living standards, then public unrest, state repression and state attempts to dragoon and exploit business will all inevitably increase radically, and so will the unhappiness of the wider elites.
These, however, lack the collective institutions and, perhaps more importantly, the collective identities that would allow them to combine easily to unseat Putin. The Duma, or lower house of Russia’s parliament, was succinctly described to me by a Russian friend as “a compost heap full of assorted rotten vegetables”. This is a bit too unkind — the Duma does contain some decent people — but it would be futile to look to it for any kind of political leadership.
The army, which elsewhere in the world would be the usual institution behind a coup, has been determinedly depoliticised, first by the Soviet state and now by Putin’s, in return for huge state funding. It is also now committed to military victory in Ukraine, or at least something that can be presented as victory.
On the other hand, Putin’s ruthless purging of the upper ranks of the military, along with the apparent incompetence with which the high command has steered the invasion of Ukraine, could lead to considerable future discontent in the army, including lower-rank generals. This means that while the military will not itself move against Putin, it is also very unlikely to move to save him.
Some of the most effective pressure on Putin’s elite may come from their own children. The parents almost all grew up and began their careers in the final years of the Soviet Union. Their children, however, have in many cases been educated and lived largely in the west. Many agree, at least in private, with Elizaveta Peskova, daughter of Putin’s press spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who protested against the war on Instagram (the post was quickly removed). Dinner conversations in the Peskov family must be interesting affairs these days.
The siloviki, however, are so closely identified with Putin and the war that a change in the Russian regime would have to involve the departure of most from power, possibly in return for a promise that they would not be arrested and would retain their family’s wealth (this was the guarantee that Putin made with his predecessor Yeltsin).
Yet this change may be a long time coming. The siloviki have been accurately portrayed as deeply corrupt — but their corruption has special features. Patriotism is their ideology and the self-justification for their immense wealth. I once chatted over a cup of tea with a senior former Soviet official who had kept in touch with his old friends in Putin’s elite. “You know,” he mused, “in Soviet days most of us were really quite happy with a dacha, a colour TV and access to special shops with some western goods, and holidays in Sochi. We were perfectly comfortable, and we only compared ourselves with the rest of the population, not with the western elites.
“Now today, of course, the siloviki like their western luxuries, but I don’t know if all this colossal wealth is making them happier or if money itself is the most important thing for them. I think one reason they steal on such a scale is that they see themselves as representatives of the state and they feel that to be any poorer than a bunch of businessmen would be a humiliation, even a sort of insult to the state. It used to be that official rank gave you top status. Now you have to have huge amounts of money too. That is what the 1990s did to Russian society.”
The siloviki are naturally attached to the idea of public order, an order that guarantees their own power and property, but which they also believe is essential to prevent Russia falling back into the chaos of the 1990s and the Russian revolution and civil war. The disaster of the 1990s, in their view, embraced not just a catastrophic decline of the state and economy but socially destructive moral anarchy — and their reaction has been not unlike that of conservative American society to the 1960s or conservative German society to the 1920s.
In this, Putin and the siloviki have the sympathy of very large parts of the Russian population, who remain bitterly resentful — both at the way they were betrayed and plundered in the 1990s and what they perceive as the open contempt shown towards ordinary Russians by the liberal cultural elites of Moscow and St Petersburg.
On one memorable occasion in the mid-1990s, I was asked to give an after-dinner talk at a conference held by a leading western bank for western investors and Russia’s financial elite. The dinner took place at a famous Moscow nightclub. When I ran out of time, there was no question of a polite note from the chairman; instead, a jazzed-up version of a Soviet patriotic song started blaring, and behind me on the stage appeared someone in a bear costume waving the Russian military ensign and leading a line of dancers clad in very abbreviated versions of Russian national dress.
Faced with this competition, I didn’t even try to carry on with my carefully considered summing-up, but retired bemused to my table. Then, however, I began to get a distinctly cold feeling. I remembered a scene from the 1972 film Cabaret, set in a nightclub in Weimar Berlin not long before the Nazis’ rise to power, in which dancers perform a parody of a parade before a giggling audience to the tune of a famous German military march. I wondered whether in Russia, too, there was going to be a terrible bill to pay for all this jollity — and I fear that Ukraine, and Russian soldiers, are now paying it.
One of the worst effects of this war is going to be deep and long-lasting Russian isolation from the west. I believe, however, that Putin and the siloviki (though not many in the wider elites) welcome this isolation. They are becoming impressed with the Chinese model: a tremendously dynamic economy, a disciplined society and a growing military superpower ruled over with iron control by a hereditary elite that combines huge wealth with deep patriotism, promoting the idea of China as a separate and superior civilisation.
They may well want the west to push Russia into the arms of China, despite the risk that this will turn Russia into a dependency of Beijing. And of course they believe the war in Ukraine will consolidate patriotic feeling in Russia behind their rule, as well as permitting them to engage in intensified repression in the name of support for the war effort. This repression has already begun, with the closing of Russia’s last remaining independent media and laws punishing as treason any criticism of the war.
Above all, for deep historical, cultural, professional and personal reasons, the siloviki and the Russian official elite in general are utterly, irrevocably committed to the idea of Russia as a great power and one pole of a multipolar world. If you do not believe in that, you are not part of the Russian establishment, just as if you do not believe in US global primacy you are not part of the US foreign and security establishment.
Ukraine’s place in this doctrine was accurately summed up by former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski: “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.” The Russian establishment entirely agrees. They have also agreed, for the past 15 years at least, that America’s intention is to reduce Russia to a subservient third-rate power. More recently, they have concluded that France and Germany will never oppose the US. “To the west, we have only enemies,” as one establishment intellectual told me in 2019.
The Russian establishment sees encouragement of Ukrainian nationalism as a key element in Washington’s anti-Russian strategy. Even otherwise calm and reasonable members of the Russian establishment have snarled with fury when I have dared to suggest in conversation that it might be better for Russia itself to let Ukraine go. They seem prepared, if necessary, to fight on ruthlessly for a long time, and at immense cost and risk to their regime, to prevent that happening.
I don’t think we can answer this with certainty at this point, but Blumenthal points out some things that look suspicious. Time will tell. We have to remember that several claims made in this war were later debunked, including the Ghost of Kiev and Snake Island. Even the claim about Russia bombing the Babi Yar memorial site in Kiev turned out to be distorted – the site itself was not attacked but an area near the site. All sides in a war engage in propaganda. We must have skepticism and consider who benefits from a particular claim and whether it can be credibly verified. There is also chaos and confusion in war zones and sometimes information is just mistaken.- Natylie
Testimony by evacuated Mariupol residents and warnings of a false flag attack undermine the Ukrainian government’s claims about a Russian bombing of a local theater sheltering civilians.
Western media have reported that Russia’s military deliberately attacked the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama theater in Mariupol, Ukraine, claiming that it was filled with civilians and marked with signs reading “children” on its grounds.
The supposed bombing took place just as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed to US Congress for a no fly zone, fueling the chorus for direct military confrontation with Russia and apparently inspiring President Joseph Biden to brand Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, as a “war criminal.”
A closer look reveals that local residents in Mariupol had warned three days before the March 16 incident that the theater would be the site of a false flag attack launched by the openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which controlled the building and the territory around it.
Civilians that escaped the city through humanitarian corridors have testified that they were held by Azov as human shields in area, and that Azov fighters detonated parts of the theater as they retreated. Despite claims of a massive Russian airstrike that reduced the building to ashes, all civilians appear to have escaped with their lives.
Video of the attack on the theater remains unavailable at the time of publication; only photographs of the damaged structure can be viewed. The Russian Ministry of Defense has denied conducting an airstrike on the theater, asserting that the site had no military value and that no sorties were flown in the area on March 16.
While the Russian military operation in Ukraine has triggered a humanitarian crisis in Mariupol, it is clear that Russia gained nothing by targeting the theater, and virtually guaranteed itself another public relations blow by targeting a building filled with civilians – including ethnic Russians.
Azov, on the other hand, stood to benefit from a dramatic and grisly attack blamed on Russia. In full retreat all around Mariupol and facing the possibility of brutal treatment at the hands of a Russian military hellbent on “de-Nazification,” its fighters’ only hope seemed to lie in triggering direct NATO intervention.
The same sense of desperation informed Zelensky’s carefully scripted address to Congress, in which he invoked Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech and played a heavily produced video depicting civilian suffering to make the case for a no fly zone.
By instigating Western public outrage over grisly Russian war crimes, Ukraine’s government is clearly aiming to generate enough pressure to overcome the Biden administration’s reluctance to directly confront Russia’s military.
But Kiev’s most emotionally potent allegation so far – that Russia deliberately bombed innocent children cowering inside a theater – has been undercut by testimonies from Mariupol residents and a widely viewed Telegram message explicitly foreshadowing a false flag attack on the building…
A statement from The Bell: The risks for journalists working in Russia rose exponentially last week after a law was passed that punishes the spread of ‘fake news’ with up to 15 years in jail. It’s already well known that Russian officials refuse to describe events in Ukraine as a ‘war’, preferring the term ‘special military operation’. As a result, we are halting all direct coverage of Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine until further notice — although we will, of course, continue to report on its far-reaching economic, political and social consequences. If you notice that we’re being circumspect about our choice of language and topics — you’re right. We are. At the moment we believe that’s the only way we can protect our journalists, and continue to function as a media outlet.
Scum & traitors
Since the start of the ‘special military operation, almost every one of Putin’s speeches has been chilling. But the speech he gave on Wednesday at a government meeting still stands out. No head of state in post-Soviet Russia has ever made such threatening allusions to the possibility of mass repression.
The first part of Putin’s speech was devoted to bolstering the Russian narrative of the past week: claims that Ukraine is developing biological and chemical weapons. “With foreign technical support, the pro-Nazi Kyiv regime would have obtained weapons of mass destruction in the foreseeable future and, of course, would have used them against Russia,” Putin said. “There was a network of dozens of laboratories in Ukraine, where military biological programmes were conducted under the guidance and with the financial support of the Pentagon, including experiments with coronavirus strains, anthrax, cholera, African swine fever and other deadly diseases”.Putin said three times that Russia had no choice about how to act in Ukraine: it “simply had to” start a “military operation”, that it “had no right to act differently” and that “we were left with no option but to defend ourselves”.
Another section of the speech was devoted to one of Putin’s favorite theories — the apparent decline of the West. “The truth is that the problems faced by millions of people in the West are the result of many years of actions by the ruling elite of your respective countries, their mistakes, and short-sighted policies and ambitions. This elite is not thinking about how to improve the lives of their citizens in Western countries. They are obsessed with their own self-serving interests and super profits… the whole planet is now paying for the West’s ambitions.”
According to Putin, Russia will never allow itself to be brow-beaten. “Russia will never sink to such miserable humiliation,” he said. “The battle we are fighting is a battle for our sovereignty, for the future of our country and our children. We will fight for the right to be and remain Russia.”
But the most attention-grabbing section was when Putin focused on a “fifth column of national traitors.” He said: “They [the collective West] will back the so-called fifth column of national traitors – those who make money here in our country but live over there, and “live” not in the geographical sense of the word but in their minds, in their servile mentality. I do not in the least condemn those who have villas in Miami or on the French Riviera, who cannot make do without foie gras, oysters or so-called gender freedom. That is not the problem, not at all. The problem, again, is that many of these people are, essentially, over there in their minds and not here with our people and with Russia. In their opinion it is a sign of belonging to the superior caste, the superior race. People like this would sell their own mothers just to be allowed to sit in the entrance hall of the superior caste.”
Putin alleged that the “collective West” was trying to divide Russia, provoke civil unrest and, ultimately, destroy the country. “But any nation, and even more so the Russian people, will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors — who will simply be spat out like a mosquito… I am convinced that a natural and necessary self-detoxification of society like this will strengthen our country, our solidarity and cohesion, and our readiness to respond to any challenge.”
Criminal cases
Putin’s comments about a “fifth column” sent shockwaves through Russian society. “This statement by the president of my country shocked, insulted and offended me,” a retired high-ranked KGB foreign intelligence operative wrote on Facebook. “I served for 30 years and I don’t want to be ‘spat out’ along with 25 million others who don’t agree.”
Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, had to explain Thursday that the president did not have mass repression in mind. But he repeated the same chilling rhetoric: “A lot of people show themselves, in Russian terms, as traitors. They themselves disappear from our lives, some quit their jobs, some leave the services, others leave the country and go to live in different states. This is how a cleansing happens,” he said.
Russian officials understand how to read the signals from the top. A couple of hours after Putin’s speech, the Investigative Committee said it had opened the first case under a new law that criminalizes the publishing of ‘fake news’ about the Russian army (that can be p[unished by up to 15 years in jail). Their first target was a woman who fits Putin’s words about those who “cannot make do without foie gras”: Instagram star Veronika Belotserkovskaya, the ex-wife of a gambling tycoon who has long lived in France. Clearly, Belotserkovskaya cannot be sent to jail, but there are also new cases against people currently in Russia: two were recently opened in the Tomsk Region of Siberia.
So far, there are relatively few criminal cases linked to the fighting in Ukraine. However, there are already dozens of ‘administrative cases’ that could entail fines of up to 50,000 rubles ($500) and lead to jail time for repeat offenses. One such case was opened by investigators in the southern city of Krasnodar after a man waiting in a traffic jam got out of his car and spat at an advertising hoarding with the now-infamous ‘Z’ symbol. One of the more alarming things about this video is that the man was almost certainly only arrested after being denounced by a motorist behind him — likely the one who filmed the incident.
At the same time, the authorities are piling pressure on Russia’s remaining opposition. Police raided the homes of politicians from the liberal Yabloko Party and independent journalists in the north-western city of Pskov early Friday morning. Their targets included prominent Yabloko politician Lev Shlosberg, and local journalist Svetlana Prokopyeva (who is not a member of Yabloko). In the case of Prokopyeva, police broke down her door, hauled her out of bed and held her face-down on the floor while she was handcuffed.
A court will announce its verdict Tuesday in the trial of opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. The prosecution is asking for him to receive a 13-year prison sentence.
Support for the ‘special military operation’
Surveys show that Russians support the Kremlin’s ‘special military operation’. State-owned pollster VTsIOM said at the start of the month that 71 percent of Russians support the operation, 70 percent think it’s going well and 84 percent trust the military.
Even independent polling outfits, which cannot be accused of bias, give similar figures. One independent poll published by Kirill Sukhotsky, European bureau chief for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty,showed that 75 percent of people get their news about the ‘special military operation’ from the television and 75 percent support military action. Moreover, from late February to mid-March, Sukhotsky wrote, the amount of support has grown.
The Bell obtained figures from another independent survey in which Russians were asked to identify the aims of the ‘special military operations’. A total of 32 percent said it was to “assist the Donetsk and Lugansk Republics”, 15 percent said it was to “protect Russia’s security” and a further 15 percent offered various other positive explanations (including “we’re saving everyone”). However, 27 percent said that they did not understand the aims of the military action. Only 3.7 percent described it as “Russian aggression”.
Obviously, it’s impossible to entirely trust the words of those taking part in surveys in an authoritarian country during a period of military conflict. At the same time, though, this is the sort of sociological data that the Kremlin is likely using when making decisions.
Limited opposition and protest
There is no mass opposition movement in Russia. Demonstrations against the ‘special military operation’ have been sporadic and uncoordinated. Even so, protest-monitoring group OVD-Info said more than 15,000 people have been detained by police in three weeks.
The most high-profile protest in Russia came from Marina Ovsyannikova, a member of the production team at state-owned Channel One who burst onto the set of a news broadcast waving an anti-war poster. She has since been fined 30,000 rubles ($250), and she may yet face a criminal prosecution and jail time.
The only member of the Russian political elite to openly speak out against the ‘special military operation’ is Arkady Dvorkovich, a former deputy deputy prime minister and the current president of the International Chess Federation (FIDE). Dvorkovich is also head of the Skolkovo Foundation, a high-tech fund that was set-up when Dmitry Medvedev was president to build bridges between Russia and the West. The day after Dvorkovich’s initial comments, the Skolkovo Foundation published a second statement from Dvorkovich — this time without any anti-war sentiment but with condemnations of Western sanctions and a world order in which “Nazism and the domination of one nation over others is possible”.
It seems likely Dvorkovich was hoping to remain president of FIDE (a position he is unlikely to continue to hold without condemnation of Russia) and keep his role at Skolkovo. But his gambit failed: after Putin made his ‘fifth column’ speech, a top official from the ruling United Russia party, Andrei Turchak, publicly accused Dvorkovich of “treason” and demanded his dismissal. Dvorkovich announced his departure Friday.
The most influential group of Russians suffering in the current circumstances are the country’s super-rich. Western sanctions have deprived them of money, yachts and private jets. However, there have been few public statements of dissent. The most outspoken billionaire so far has been Mikhail Fridman, the founder of Alfa-Group who is worth $12.1 billion (prior to sanctions). In an interview to Bloomberg, Fridman complained that he was having to live in London on the €2,500 ($2,768) a month that the U.K. government will allow him to withdraw from his bank. Fridman also stated that Russian billionaires have no way of influencing Putin. On the latter point at least, he is right: in the past (which Fridman prefers not to discuss) such opportunities existed — but those days are over. Billionaires today are one of the biggest losers from Russia’s ‘special military operation’, and have no instruments to try and change the situation. Not one big business owner or prominent entrepreneur in Russia has spoken out against what the Kremlin is currently doing in Ukraine.
This is an interview with the author (Prabhat Patnaik) of the article of the same name, excerpted and linked to below. The IMF’s role in the events of 2014 in Ukraine isn’t talked about as much as the EU Association agreement. – Natylie
The IMF Connection with the Ukraine Crisis by Prabhat Patnaik, 3/7/22, Network Ideas Blog
The security concerns of Russia arising from Ukraine’s intentions of joining NATO have been widely discussed in the media. But the IMF’s link with Ukraine which is a parallel issue has scarcely received much attention. The IMF, as is well-known, “opens up” economies around the world for the penetration of metropolitan capital by making them “investor-friendly” through the adoption of a host of anti-working class and anti-people (“austerity”) measures; and such “opening up” typically involves the taking over of natural resources of the countries and also their land areas by metropolitan capital. The mechanism that the IMF typically uses towards this end is the imposition of “conditionalities” for giving loans to countries that are in need of balance of payments support.
In addition, however, to this general role that the IMF plays, there are occasions when it plays a specific role, namely, that of supporting the US government’s cold war objectives. And in the case of Ukraine, it has played this specific role almost from the very beginning, apart from its general role of opening up the Ukrainian economy to metropolitan capital.
Prior to 2014 when Viktor Yanukovych was the president of Ukraine, that country had been in negotiations with the IMF as part of its trade integration with the European Union. The IMF had asked Ukraine to undertake a number of “reforms”: to cut wages; to “reform” and “reduce” the health and education sectors, which in Ukraine were major employment-generating areas; and to cut the subsidy on natural gas that was provided by the State to all Ukrainian citizens which made energy affordable for them (Bryce Green, FAIR, February 24). President Yanukovych was reluctant to implement these “reforms” which would have imposed a heavy burden on the people; he stopped negotiating with the IMF and started negotiating with Russia instead…
