Putin may appear all-powerful but Russia’s Caesar is mortal, too
During the course of Vladimir Putin’s hours of triumph these past few days, in which the enormous parade to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Second World War was followed by a 78% victory in Russia’s referendum, one wonders whether the President has any equivalent of the Roman slave who whispered to Rome’s dictator: “You, too, oh Caesar, are mortal.”
Maybe he doesn’t need one. Ben Noble explains that Putin is unlikely to claim his full whack of being able to run twice more for office. That would take him to 2036, and he would be 84. Well before then he could resemble Landseer’s Stag at Bay, with many other bucks challenging from the web of Russia’s cliques and clans.
But on the international scene, Putin is in quite a jam at the moment, from Ukraine round to the eastern Mediterranean, and from the Baltics to the High Arctic.
Russian assets are now over-committed in both Syria and Libya in that they have limited manoeuvre. In both theatres Putin is stuck with two declining local allies, Bashar al-Assad, whose military dictatorship is technically insolvent, and in Libya his protégé Khalifa Haftar is now in retreat, increasingly dependent on his Russian and Sudanese mercenary fighters. The Russian game plan for Libya, as for Syria, looks increasingly threadbare.
But the biggest trouble from the neighbours is coming from the most powerful and most aggressive of them all, China, the perpetual frenemy. Last week China failed to show up at the scheduled round of talks in Vienna to renew the New START ballistic nuclear weapons treaty, which is due to expire in the summer of next year. Russia had wanted the talks to be multilateral and not just between the two blocs of Russia and the US plus their immediate allies, such as Britain and France.
China didn’t bother to send a formal note declining attendance – the Chinese flags were hastily cleared from the conference tables. This visibly shook the Russians, according to the US negotiator, Marshall Billingsea, in a press briefing last week. Russia, he said, was unwilling to extend START without the Chinese.
Under present treaty arrangements, Russia and the US each hold about 1,500 strategic nuclear warheads. China holds about 300 active warheads, but is developing and upgrading its capability in several directions. This was the most alarming part of Billingsea’s brief.
“They are really doubling down. The nuclear facility at Lop Nur is now working in three 24 hour shifts, and has been for a year. They are now aiming at parity with America and Russia,” said Billingsea. “They appear to be adopting a triad of capabilities –in land, sea, air/space.”
In answer to a question, he said it was now possible that Beijing would no longer agree to foreswear first use of nuclear weapons.
Many fear we are entering a new era of arms control anarchy, with the stalling of START, and the abandoning of both the Intermediate Nuclear Treaty (INF) and the Open Skies agreement. Billingsea excused President Trump’s ditching of the INF, because the Russians had been “cheating” anyway, with the hidden development of potent theatre weapons.
Most concerning is the SSC 8 9M729 programme, which has been long in the making. This is a powerful medium range land-based and submarine launched system – with the latter using torpedo tube launchers – capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
It is not clear where, when and exactly how Russia would use such missiles. Interestingly, Russia has been cautious about ordering use of the S400 air defence system that it has sold to Turkey and based in Syria. There may be some pause for thought in the Kremlin as America and China seem headed for building up nuclear stockpiles.
The revelation that the GRU, Moscow’s defence intelligence, has been siphoning funds to the Taliban to kill American and British soldiers in Afghanistan has fallen in the same week of Putin appealing to Trump to get China into the nuclear talks.
The US briefings are hinting that all bets are off with the development of new tactical and battlefield nuclear weapons. These are now graced with a new vocabulary that Orwell would have admired: they are no longer “tactical nukes” but “unrestrained battlefield weapons.”
But the Putin modus operandi is suffering severe practical testing in the deserts of Syria and Libya. It is when his military activities turn from latent to actual that they seem to run into trouble. In Libya and Syria, notions of the “Gerasimov doctrine” of “non-war war”, posturing by gangsters as patriots, and “little green men” comes unstuck.
Here, the facts on the ground are too grimly obvious. Russia has to support Assad, whose other two principal allies, Hezbollah and Iran, veer between flaky and downright hostile. Assad’s forces struggle after nine years of fratricidal warfare. Even the dominant Alawite clan is now divided in itself.
Russia seems to condemned to double down on its minimalist approach. It doesn’t want to commit ground forces much beyond police guard forces for its own assets and bases, and the gestural deployment of Mr Prigozihn’s Wagner Group mercenaries. Moscow’s minimalist goal is to hang on to the sea and air bases at Latakia, Tartus, and Hmeimim at all costs.
In Libya there appears to be a miserable minimalism to the war aims, too.
With Haftar’s forces being unceremoniously pushed out of the Tripoli sector – thanks largely to Turkish mercenary and other forces with surprisingly good battlefield weapons – Russia has had to reinforce. Wagner mercenaries, which haven’t been too successful recently, have tried to block Libya’s biggest oilfield at al-Sharara, helped by 300 Sudanese mercenaries. A wing of 14 Mig-29 fighter-bombers, with Russian pilots, has been based at al-Joufra, the air base strategically based between Tripoli and Benghazi, Haftar’s crumbling domain.
Russia, Egypt and others are being urged by Haftar and the UAE – big losers in the latest defeats in Libya – to hold a line between Sirte on the coast and Joufra in the desert. Not many of the local tribes and fighters seem minded to get involved in another round of bloodshed and atrocity round Sirte.
The dispatch of planes, the Mig 29s, plus Su-24 strike planes and air transporters, is almost uncharacteristically risky for Moscow. It requires a team of ground crew and logisticians, including ammunition and ordnance handlers, and has to be forwarded to al-Joufra, where conditions must be less than clement at the height of the Libyan summer. It will be interesting to see how long the Russians stay in the desert – most likely a few months at most. It would then require a full roulement of personnel and equipment, including the combat planes.
Again, Putin appears to be working to a minimalist end game, revealed by the move into the El-Sharara oilfield. Here the aim is to ensure that the Libyan oil and gas fields which, despite years of fighting, are still under the unified governance of the National Oil Corporation, don’t return to anything like full production. This would have the potential of depressing world oil prices further, causing further damage to Russia’s export monocrop.
There is less organisation than meets the eye to Putin’s policy of global disruption. This is the impression from the latest account of mayhem and mischief committed by his agencies, “Shadow State”, by the Guardian’s Luke Harding. It is the third in a series beginning with “A Very Expensive Poison” about the murder of Alexander Litvinenko by polonium in London in November 2008.
Harding covers the activity of GRU agents, killers, disrupters, fake news manufacturers, and affiliated mischief makers of the Putin circle over the last ten years. He looks at the story of targeted assassinations under his rule. The techniques and tactics were adopted from the Soviet agencies, but have been noticeably less successful.
We have seen the bungled attempt to kill Sergei and Julia Skripal in Salisbury, Britian. There is a graphic account of the keystone cops’ attempt to subvert and hack the headquarters of the Office for the Prohibition of Chemical Warfare in The Hague. The operatives were caught red-handed with clunky hacking kit in the boot of their hired Citroen hatchback in a hotel car park right next to the OPCW.
The author sets out to fill the gaps left by the Mueller Inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 US election campaign – “a historic miss,” says Harding. It also looks at the enquiries into Russian-sponsored subversion and counter propaganda – “fake news” is too sloppy a description – in UK politics, including the 2016 referendum. This lacuna should have been filled by the Intelligence and Security report delivered last October, with publication yet again postponed last week.
The bombardment of names and biographies at times is deafening, but they help make this a standard reference work for journalists and interested citizens for generations to come, replete with unparalleled sources of the highest quality, not least Elliott Higgins of Bellingcat.
The Russians were completely taken aback, I have on good authority, by the speed at which they worked to unmask the would-be killers of the Skripals and the actual murders of Dawn Sturgess, Colonels Anatoliy Chepega and Alexander Mishkin of the GRU, whose mission to Salisbury was in Harding’s words “an embarrassing failure.”
But what is the strategic end of Putin’s game? What is the disruption, mischief and chaos for? Self-aggrandisement and putting “Russia First”?
Behind the myth, there is always the money – Putin is running a giant kleptocracy along mafia lines, concludes Harding, very much agreeing with other esteemed observers such as Peter Pomerantsev. The new great Russian, though, may be a giant Ptomkin village in the end, strong in arms and cunning schemes, but surprisingly void of human values.
This is what the slave should be telling President Putin in his hour of triumph. You are mortal because the lore of the mafiosi says you are caught in a permanent cycle of deadly competition.
There are two immediate and piquant challenges – maybe beyond the new Czar’s powers to control: Covid-19 is still rampant, and that doesn’t fit with the image of omnipotent leadership. Finally, the omnipotent leader of All the Russias could be about to take leave of his best ally in his enterprise of mayhem and mischief, Donald J. Trump.