Russian President Vladimir Putin’s apparent mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic could allow “a potential new leader of Russia” to rival the Kremlin strongman, according to one of President Trump’s top former advisers.
“I think power is certainly going to shift really away from him to others,” Retired Army Gen. H.R. McMaster said during a Hoover Institution event.
McMaster, the president’s second White House national security adviser, oversaw the development of the 2017 National Security Strategy that highlighted Russia’s attempts “to weaken U.S. influence in the world and divide us from our allies and partners.” The coronavirus emerged at an inconvenient time for those efforts because it interrupted some of Putin’s plans to consolidate power at a time when he is already beset by falling oil prices and a struggling economy.
“It has a very interesting historical parallel because the Soviet Union started to tremble — it had a lot of weakness — when oil prices collapsed,” a Baltic official told the Washington Examiner in response to McMaster’s comments. “So, from an historical perspective, it might be right.”
Putin began the year intending for these spring months to feature a sustained campaign to burnish his political image and eliminate impediments to his rule. He scheduled a referendum for Wednesday that was designed to ratify a plan to amend the constitution so that he could remain in power until 2036, a vote that was to have been followed by a high-profile annual celebration of victory in World War II. Instead, both events were delayed due to the coronavirus, and Putin disappeared from public view rather than fill the void left by their absence with new programming.
“All of a sudden, all his efforts to solidify power were overshadowed by the COVID-19 outbreak,” Alisa Muzergues, a foreign policy analyst at GLOBSEC in the Slovak Republic, told the Washington Examiner. “The prices for oil, which is the backbone of the Russian already shattered economy, collapsed. And the myth of his strong image, which he and his entourage have been so carefully working on and projecting both inside and outside Russia, could be ruined.”
His absence created the space, and the necessity, for local officials to act independently of the Kremlin.
“When Putin was away, hiding in his own dacha, local governors took a lot of control fighting pandemic, so people trust more than before local governments,” the Baltic official said. “In Russia, it’s a big thing when you are starting your own initiatives without the czar.”
Putin has gripped the top of the Kremlin’s greasy pole for more than 20 years, in part because his prospective rivals tend to find themselves marginalized or even murdered before they can mount a serious challenge.
“Putin was very clever, he kind of either killed or bought all the potential competitors and political opponents,” the Baltic official continued. “The ones that he couldn’t buy or couldn’t subdue, he either killed or put in jail.”
Yet Putin needs the regional governors and local officials to succeed in containing the outbreak, analysts agree, in order to avoid popular anger spreading alongside the contagion.
“The ruble has crashed to four-year lows, the Russian Central Bank warned the economy could shrink by 6 percent this year,” Muzergues wrote in an email. “In reality, the situation can get much worse, and it will be especially felt in the regions, which might become the epicenters of the expression of discontent.”
“Putin managed to outlive crises before, but this combination of challenges and constantly growing discontent in Russian society might become fatal for his governance,” she added in an email.
The Baltic official was cautious not to forecast any major upheaval. “The Kremlin has a very solid grip on power — at least, that’s what it seems from outside,” the official said. “In Russia, it’s always very unpredictable. Like, nobody also expects the many revolutions that happened in Russia, but they happened.”
Yet they all agreed that “the pressure on Putin is certainly going to mount,” as McMaster put it Thursday. And if power shifts away from a leader who has chosen to oppose U.S. interests in multiple disputes around the world, then, McMaster added, it might flow to “others who view Russia’s future more as aligned with Europe and the West than with China’s Communist Party.”
