There is nothing like looking back to marvel at how the man who will perpetuate himself in power in Russia has changed with the elections ending today, Sunday, after three days of voting. For years after Boris Yeltsin ceded the presidency to him on the last day of 1999, former KGB colonel Vladimir Putin took on the Western leaders he considered his partners. Almost a quarter of a century later, those leaders have long since succeeded each other democratically, and Western countries and the Kremlin are irreconcilable enemies.
Putin has been in power longer than any other head of the Kremlin since Joseph Stalin. The constitutional reform of 2020 that he himself promoted now allows him to perpetuate himself with a fifth presidential term until 2030 and, if he wishes, to run again and perpetuate himself in power until May 2036, a few months earlier to be 84 years old. Then he will have overcome the Soviet dictator.
After winning his first presidential election with a modest and today unthinkable 52.94% in 2000, Putin had to deal with serious crises in the early years. In August 2000, the Kursk nuclear submarine sank in the Barents Sea. Newbie sinner, he was on vacation and only took the situation by the horns after four days. At first he refused to receive Western aid, and images of the mothers of the 118 dead sailors demanding an explanation went around the world.
On the first day of the school year in 2004, a Chechen commando hijacked a school in Beslan, in the Caucasus. More than a thousand people lived through two days of ordeal that was resolved with hell. The intervention of Russian forces and the clash with the terrorists ended in a bloodbath: 330 dead, including 186 children.
The assault was controversial, just as it had been two years earlier, when the hijacking of Moscow’s Dubrovka theater was solved by force, where 170 people died, including many civilians poisoned by gas to paralyze the hijackers. Russia was then living through the aftermath of the second Chechen war, in which Putin had been involved since 1999, when Yeltsin was prime minister. The heavy hand provided him with popularity and justified his actions in the Caucasus.
Meanwhile, he came face to face with Western world leaders, whom he then treated as partners. In 2001, Putin raised the possibility of Russia joining NATO to then US President Bill Clinton, as the Russian president revealed in 2017 to film director Oliver Stone and recently repeated in an interview with journalist Tucker Carlson.
On September 11, 2001, he was one of the first world leaders to call George W. Bush after the Al-Qaeda attacks on the United States. And then Moscow even helped Washington launch its campaign in Afghanistan. “I looked the man in the eyes. I found him very direct and trustworthy,” Bush said of Putin.
In 2003, Putin received former French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in his hometown, Saint Petersburg, to strengthen his alliance of countries opposed to the US intervention in Iraq.
And he also organized big events and summits that showed that Russia had weight and cut some of the cod out of world politics, one of the Kremlin’s great wishes. On May 9, 2005, he received 50 world leaders in Red Square to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the victory in the Second World War. In 2006, the G-8 summit was held in the city of Neva, and Putin established himself as a world leader.
But Putin’s trust in Western countries, or vice versa, was lost over the years. NATO’s eastward expansion has always weighed heavily on Moscow. The West, moreover, never bit its tongue when criticizing the violation of human rights in Chechnya. And the assassinations that followed each other contributed to increasing the distance. On October 7, 2006, Putin’s birthday, a hitman killed investigative journalist Anna Politkóvskaia as she was returning home. The following month, ex-KGB agent and Kremlin critic Aleksandr Litvinenko was murdered in London with radioactive polonium dissolved in his tea, and the United Kingdom accused Moscow.
In 2007, at the Munich Security Conference, Putin criticized the US for monopolizing world politics. He assured that NATO had promised him not to expand in Eastern Europe. The approach of Ukraine to the Atlantic Alliance was one of the arguments for sending troops to the neighboring country in 2022. With that speech, Putin began to let loose ballast with the West until reaching what is already the second cold war .
The interregnum from 2008 to 2012, when Putin ceded the presidency to his ally Dmitri Medvedev while he remained prime minister, marked a before and an after. The war in Georgia in August 2008 showed that Putin was still in command and that he was ready to regain strength in his area of ??influence.
This became more than clear in 2014 after the pro-Western revolution of the Maidan, the Russian annexation of Crimea and the start of the war in Donbass which provoked the pro-Russian militias.
After the legislative elections of December 2011, the opposition organized the most important demonstrations of the entire period. It is when a key opposition leader emerged in the last decade, Aleksei Navalni, who died last month in an Arctic prison. Unease grew because Putin had decided to remove Medvedev and return to the Kremlin. In the 2012 elections he won by a margin (63.6%).
It was a kind of swan song of the Russian extra-parliamentary opposition, because if before the power had limited itself to keeping it away from the institutions, since then a repression began that gradually intensified and that reached at its peak in 2021, when Navalni was arrested and demonstrations of support were forcibly disbanded.
With the intervention in Ukraine just over two years ago, the situation reached a point of no return. Every critical voice against the war or the army has ended up in prison or exile. Independent media, banned or forced to close.
Since that moment the life, and also the death, of Russians, the economy, international relations, have revolved around the war with Ukraine, which according to the Kremlin did not begin with the launch of the “special military operation ” on February 24, 2022, but in 2014 in the Donbass.
For Putin, Russia is waging an existential battle with the West. But there have also been crucial moments for the very existence of the Russian political system. In June 2023, the most dangerous moment of this quarter century of Putin’s power took place. Yevgeny Prigozhin, head and master of the Wagner mercenary group, took up arms against the senior leaders of the Russian army, whom he accused of incompetence in Ukraine.
His men took control of military centers in southern Russia, including the city of Rostov-on-Don, and a column began to march toward Moscow. It could not be stopped by force and the riot stopped a few hundred kilometers from the Russian capital after a pact facilitated by Aleksandr Lukashenko, the Belarusian leader allied to Putin, who promised forgiveness to the rioters. Two months later, Prigozhin died in a mysterious plane crash.
