Do swidaniya Vlad? Which translates as Goodbye, Vladimir? That is what analysts are now asking because of the ever-worsening stuff for Russian President Vladimir Putin, especially since the start of the Ukraine war.
It was more than 20 years ago that Boris Yeltsin, already visibly frail at the time, nominated him as prime minister and designated successor as head of the Kremlin. Since then, the now 69-year-old has been prime minister, president, prime minister and president again and again – for the Russian constitution has a limit on how long the state can stay in office.
Not even he himself expected that Putin would ever reach the highest offices. He grew up as a boy in a working-class family in a Leningrad backyard. His mother endured the nearly 900-day blockade by Hitler’s Wehrmacht in the Neva city.
To fight back against the strong guys, Mr Sutka learned judo, and after school, joined the KGB at an early age. Until the fall of the GDR, He served with the Soviet intelligence service in Dresden. In 1990, Mr KGB’s first job after that was at Leningrad State University, supervising Western study-abroad students.
Only a year later, he moved to City Hall, became deputy to Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, at a time when press writers campaigned for change from Gorbachev to Yeltsin, from the Soviet Union to Russia, and for Leningrad to be renamed back to St. Petersburg, and organized sit-ins in front of Putin’s and Sobchak’s offices.
In 2014, Putin overcame an emerging economic crisis and clearly dwindling approval ratings with a major foreign policy maneuver: first, “green men” – Russian soldiers without insignia – annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea. Russian troops then began providing massive support to separatists in eastern Ukraine.
This war in the Donbass is more of a partial Russian invasion than a civil war. Moreover, it serves three goals: To showcase Moscow’s modernized military power, disavow Ukraine as a model of reform for Russia, and draw new borders in Europe.
The Donbass invasion has massively destabilized Ukraine – which again most recently demonstrated a peaceful transfer of power by ballot with the election of TV comedian Volodimir Zelensky – and plunged it into an economic crisis that threatens its very existence.
Chaotic conditions in Ukraine should discourage Russians from seeing the Soviet Union’s second-largest successor state as a model of reform for themselves. After all, there are free elections and pluralistic media. However, there are still considerable economic problems due to the war in the east.
Putin has also demonstrated to the Europeans that he can shift borders in post-Cold War Europe. The sanctions imposed as a result have severely damaged the Russian economy – with the central bank alone having to burn through more than $65 billion to stabilize the ruble on the market – but have not led to any political relenting in the Kremlin.
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