Wasn’t the Russian election exciting? The battle of ideas. The scrutiny. The rhetorical cut and thrust of those TV debates.
My favourite aspect is the nail-biting uncertainty – waiting eagerly for those first exit polls, before we get the first idea of who will lead Russia for the next six years. Even then, we cannot know until the detailed results are in whether the victor will have a slender majority or a commanding lead, which determines the ambitions of their term in office.
It’s edge of your seat stuff, with a fickle electorate promising thrills and spills right to the finish line. Who could have foreseen that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin would triumph again, and with an indisputable 87.28 per cent of the popular vote?
In an astonishing coincidence, he becomes the first Russian president to serve three consecutive terms in office shortly after changing the constitution to remove the limit on how many consecutive terms a Russian president can serve.
Putin’s victory by such a huge margin will no doubt be attributed to his record in office, which is so compelling that even his leading opponent – Nikolay Kharitonov, the communist candidate who came second on 4.31 per cent – cannot find anything to publicly criticise the incumbent for. Indeed, when given the opportunity by the BBC, Mr Kharitonov modestly declined even to argue that he would be better at the job than Putin.
We should not neglect the remarkable bravery Mr Putin displayed in standing at all, in a country where so many political campaigners suffer dreadful accidents. In recent years, numerous participants in public life have recklessly ingested things like unhealthy chemicals, bullets or pavements. Mere weeks ago, Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader who clumsily drank Novichok before an international flight in 2020, died during an ill-advised trip to a penal colony in Siberia.
No wonder that the Russian electorate keeps voting for the only individual who seems to possess the fortitude and good luck to carry on and on in the Kremlin unscathed, despite such a dangerous political environment, not even catching a cold while he unobtrusively goes on heroic shirtless horse-riding adventures in view of almost no paparazzi at all.
Obviously Putin’s crimes, such as Russia’s latest presidential “election”, are laughably brazen. The prospect of anyone – still less a malevolent thug – getting 87.28 per cent of the vote in a genuinely contested election is patently ridiculous.
The examples are endless. When Russian agents deployed chemical weapons on the streets of Salisbury in 2018, two of them then gave an infamous interview in which they claimed to be on a holiday to see Salisbury Cathedral’s “famous 123-metre spire”. It was such an implausible line that it immediately spawned a thousand memes.
It’s important to mock dictators. Taking the piss has a jiu-jitsu-like capacity to turn the strength of thuggish regimes back on themselves.
There’s a risk, though, in mistaking the shameless nature of Russia’s crimes for incompetence. The massive vote-shares, the useless “opposition” candidates permitted to stand, the paper-thin excuses of would-be assassins… this might seem clumsy. But it isn’t – the brazen nature of the offence is part of the point.
These aren’t the actions of an incapable regime, but one which wishes to boast that it does not care; that yes, it has done these things, and it intends to keep on doing so.
This is just another mechanism by which to keep power and extend it further. The message to the world is one of defiance of all civilised norms; the message to the many Putin fans in Russia is one of muscle-flexing pride in criminality; and the message to Putin’s opponents is that the terror and intimidation will continue unabated.
Last week, when Navalny aide Leonid Volkov was savagely beaten with a hammer outside his home in Lithuania, a base for many critics of Putinism, the Western press had to recite dutiful disclaimers. Persons unknown were responsible. Suspicions were raised that Russia “might” be behind it. But of course it was – this is beyond obvious. And the physical suffering of Volkov himself was again only part of the point – far more valuable to the Kremlin was the message that Navalny’s death was not the end of this assault on democracy, that there would be no let-up, and that they could reach dissidents wherever they might take refuge.
We are not helpless in the face of this conflict, but we must recognise that we are a participant in it, whether we like it not. That means implementing a true hostile environment for our enemies, which is long overdue.
Why, for example, is the UK still tolerant of Russians resident in the UK lining up at their embassy who openly boast of their support for Putin? In Latvia, by contrast, the police undertook spot-checks on the queues of Russian voters and promptly identified several who had no right to be in the country at all.
Similarly, after Salisbury our government led an international coalition to identify and expel spies working out of Russian embassies. Are we in any doubt that those spies have now been replaced? Isn’t it time that these hostile agents were chucked out again?
And in recent weeks, evidence has mounted of systematic sanction-dodging by Russian individuals, companies and state agencies importing goods from the UK – and the wider West – via central Asian nations in defiance of the restrictions put in place after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. When will we clamp down on this, to make good on our promise that there will be consequences for the crimes of the Russian army?
Russia’s dictator is indeed laughable in many ways. We should mock when we can, but we must also take him and his supporters deadly seriously.
We can laugh at Putin’s election, but the toothless West is the real joke
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19.03.2024
Wasn’t the Russian election exciting? The battle of ideas. The scrutiny. The rhetorical cut and thrust of those TV debates.
My favourite aspect is the nail-biting uncertainty – waiting eagerly for those first exit polls, before we get the first idea of who will lead Russia for the next six years. Even then, we cannot know until the detailed results are in whether the victor will have a slender majority or a commanding lead, which determines the ambitions of their term in office.
It’s edge of your seat stuff, with a fickle electorate promising thrills and spills right to the finish line. Who could have foreseen that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin would triumph again, and with an indisputable 87.28 per cent of the popular vote?
In an astonishing coincidence, he becomes the first Russian president to serve three consecutive terms in office shortly after changing the constitution to remove the limit on how many consecutive terms a Russian president can serve.
Putin’s victory by such a huge margin will no doubt be attributed to his record in office, which is so compelling that even his leading opponent – Nikolay Kharitonov, the communist candidate who came second on 4.31 per cent – cannot find anything to publicly criticise the incumbent for. Indeed, when given the opportunity by the BBC, Mr Kharitonov modestly declined even to argue that he would be better at the job than Putin.
We should not neglect........
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