There is nothing like looking back to be surprised at how much the man who will remain in power in Russia has changed with the elections that end today, Sunday, after three days of voting. For years after Boris Yeltsin handed him the presidency on the last day of 1999, former KGB lieutenant colonel Vladimir Putin rubbed shoulders with Western leaders, whom he considered his partners. Almost a quarter of a century later, those leaders have long succeeded one another democratically, and Western countries and the Kremlin are irreconcilable enemies.
Putin has been in power longer than any other Kremlin chief since Joseph Stalin. The 2020 constitutional reform that he himself promoted now allows him to continue his fifth presidential term until 2030 and, if he wishes, to run again and last until May 2036, a few months before his 84th birthday. Then he will have surpassed the Soviet dictator.
After winning his first presidential elections with a modest and now unthinkable 52.94% in 2000, Putin had to face serious crises in his early years. In August 2000, the Kursk nuclear submarine sank in the Barents Sea. Sinning as a rookie, he was on vacation and only took the situation by the horns after four days. At first he refused to receive Western help, and the images of the mothers of the 118 dead sailors asking him for explanations went around the world.
On the first day of the 2004 school year, a Chechen commando kidnapped 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 terrorists resulted in a bloodbath: 330 dead, including 186 children.
The assault brought controversy, just as it did two years earlier, when the kidnapping of the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow was solved by force, where 170 people died, including many civilians poisoned by the gas to paralyze the kidnappers. Russia was then experiencing the throes of the second Chechen war, in which Putin had been involved since 1999, when he was Yeltsin’s prime minister. The heavy hand gave him 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-President of the United States 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 against 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, reinforcing his alliance of countries opposed to the US intervention in Iraq.
And it also organized major events and summits that showed that Russia was painting and cutting part of the cod of world politics, one of the Kremlin’s greatest wishes. On May 9, 2005, she received 50 world leaders in Red Square to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the victory in World War II. 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 expansion to the east has always weighed heavily on Moscow. Furthermore, the West never held its tongue when it came to criticizing the violation of human rights in Chechnya. And the contract killings that took place contributed to increasing the distance. On October 7, 2006, Putin’s birthday, a hitman killed investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya when she was returning to her house. The following month, former KGB agent and Kremlin critic Alexander 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 criticizes the US for monopolizing world politics. He assured that NATO had promised him not to expand in eastern Europe. Ukraine’s rapprochement with the Atlantic Alliance was one of the arguments to put troops in the neighboring country in 2022. With that speech, Putin began to release ballast with the West until reaching what is now the second cold war.
The interregnum from 2008 to 2012, when Putin handed over the presidency to his ally Dimitri Medvedev while he remained prime minister, marked a before and after. The Georgian war of August 2008 showed that Putin was still in control and that he was willing to regain influence in his fiefdom.
That became more than clear in 2014 after the pro-Western Maidan revolution, the Russian annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the war in Donbass provoked by pro-Russian militias.
After the legislative elections of December 2011, the opposition mounted the largest demonstrations of the entire period. From them emerged a key opposition leader in the last decade, Alexei Navalny, who died last month in an Arctic prison. Anger grew because Putin had decided to remove Medvedev and return to the Kremlin. In the 2012 elections he won on the street (63.6%).
It was a kind of swan song for the Russian extra-parliamentary opposition, because if before the power had been limited to keeping it away from the institutions, since then a repression began that was accentuated and reached its peak in 2021, when Navalny was arrested and demonstrations of support broken up by force.
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 the 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 the 24th. February 2022, but in 2014 in Donbass.
For Putin, Russia is fighting 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 occurred. Yevgeny Prigozhin, head and owner of the Wagner mercenary group, took up arms against the high command 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 marching toward Moscow. By force it could not be stopped and the riot was stopped a few hundred kilometers from the Russian capital after an agreement facilitated by Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian leader who is an ally of Putin, who promised forgiveness to the mutineers. Two months later, Prigozhin died in a mysterious plane crash.
