Vladimir Putin: How Covid-19 and 2020 derailed the Russian president’s best-established plans

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Observers rushed to read the imprint: The constitutional revision would reset the clock to the limits of the presidential term, which could extend Putin’s power until 2036. A referendum was set for April, and Putin appeared to be heading for a lifetime presidency. .

What followed was an annus horribilis for Russia and perhaps Putin’s most challenging year to date.

As Covid-19 began to spread around the globe, Russia briefly emerged in first place. The country sealed its border with China, and Putin boasted that the virus was “under control” because of what he described as early solid measures to stop the spread of the disease.

But this approach was little more than bluster and spin. Shortly after the government announced a nationwide blockade that began on March 28, it became clear that the country was in control of a major public health crisis.

In April, Moscow recorded a mortality rate about 20% higher than the 10-year average, while the capital’s authorities indirectly acknowledged that they counted Covid-19 deaths.

The government was forced to postpone the referendum on constitutional amendments.

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Doubts have grown about how well the Kremlin is coping with pandemic management and the severity of the crisis with the Russian public.

Such suspicions only grew as doctors and medical staff in Russia turned to social media to sound the alarm about underfunded hospitals and a death toll they said was higher than officially acknowledged. Reports of front-line health workers falling from windows and fires from faulty fans made in Russia have further eroded public confidence.

Russia’s economic situation was also dire. The country has plunged into a coronavirus recession, exacerbated by falling global oil prices, a key export.

By the middle of the year, the World Bank has forecast that Russia’s GDP growth in 2020 will decline by 6%, a minimum of 11 years, accompanied by rising unemployment and rising poverty.

Such deep economic stress has threatened to derail the political program of the United Russia government, exposing deep weaknesses in the social pact that has kept Putin in power for two decades.

Reports of fans setting fire to an intensive care unit at St. George's Hospital in St. Petersburg in May added to doubts about how the Kremlin was dealing with the pandemic.

Putin’s political sustainability is often attributed to a simple bargain between him and his citizens: he accepts limited political competition in exchange for stability and a steady rise in living standards. But amid the pandemic, that business has begun to thrive.

In July, protests erupted in the far east of Khabarovsk, where thousands took to the streets in unusual street protests in support of the region’s governor, Sergei Furgal, who had been arrested and charged with orchestrating the 2004 assassination of two businessmen. 2005. Furgal denied involvement in crimes. His supporters saw the case as a political pursuit motivated by a regional opponent of Russia.
Perhaps as worrying for the Kremlin, street protests swept neighboring Belarus in August, after incumbent President Alexander Lukashenko, often described as Europe’s last dictator, said victory in an election of observers said it was affected by a widespread fraud.

Lukashenko, who has ruled since 1994, refused to leave and his security forces brutalized and detained thousands of Belarusians, leaving the Kremlin in the face of the uncomfortable scenario of citizens of a neighboring and close ally country refusing to play with a false Russian-style democracy.

The Kremlin managed to hold a nationwide referendum that ensured constitutional changes, with the help of a national voting campaign, a state holiday and the mobilization of the country’s large state sector, which accounts for much of the workforce.

But Putin’s system of democracy faced a new moment of crisis later in August, when opposition leader Alexey Navalny felt very ill in a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow.

Navalny had led a campaign called “smart voting” – an effort to get voters to run in local elections that had the best chance of defeating Russia’s candidates.

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The Kremlin critic was eventually taken to Berlin for treatment, after Russian doctors initially insisted that the opposition leader was too seriously ill to make the trip.

The German government later revealed that tests had shown that he had been poisoned with a chemical nerve agent from the Novichok group.

The Kremlin has denied any attempt to harm Navalny, and Russian state television has developed a series of conspiracy theories to explain the apparent assassination attempt.

But the Russian government drew quick criticism from international leaders, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel said: “There are very serious questions that only the Russian government can and must answer.”

In mid-December, a CNN-Bellingcat investigation found evidence that the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) had formed an elite team of nervous agents who had been following Navalny for years.
During his annual marathon press conference, Putin’s comments on the Navalny reports were as laudatory as they were a denial. “Who needs him anyway? If [Russian agents] he would have wanted to, he would probably have finished it, “Putin said.

Indeed, Navalny’s poisoning has shattered much of the goodwill that Russia has tried to build internationally in the midst of the pandemic.

In early April, the Russian government staged a coup by sending fans and protective equipment to New York to help hospitals on the front lines of the crisis.
It was the symbolism of the substance: the ventilators were the same model that caught fire in Russian hospitals, and the US Federal Emergency Management Agency said they were never used.

The Russian government has thrown its weight behind efforts to develop a coronavirus vaccine, a project that has become a matter of national prestige.

In August, Putin announced with great fanfare that Russia’s domestically developed vaccine – called Sputnik V, a name inspired by the Cold War space race – had been approved for public use, albeit not through phase 3 studies. This haste to have attracted international skepticism first, as well as the Kremlin’s subsequent recognition that Putin himself would not receive the jab.
Not surprisingly, information about Putin’s health is a well-kept secret, and the presidential administration has taken extraordinary steps to protect the head of state from coronavirus, including installing a special “disinfectant tunnel” for visitors to his residence outside Moscow and the Kremlin.

The outbreak of war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region has further tested the Russian government’s crisis management capabilities in 2020.

While the brief but intensely bloody fighting ended with the deployment of Russian peacekeeping forces in Nagorno-Karabakh, the ceasefire agreement also showed Turkey’s regional influence. Russia is no longer the only indispensable power in the post-Soviet space.

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Kremlinology is an inaccurate science, but as 2020 draws to a close, we wonder if Putin is reconsidering those apparent plans to remain president until 2036.

After all, Russian lawmakers have drawn up a possible escape plan for the Kremlin leader, approving legislation that would give former presidents immunity throughout the life of a criminal investigation.

The bill does not in any way imply the imminent departure of the Russian president – after all, Putin is a man who likes to keep his options open.

But for some observers, the bill recalled the surprise handover of former Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s power to then-Prime Minister Putin on New Year’s Eve, 1999. One of Putin’s first acts as president was the signing of a Yeltsin’s immunity.

So the end of this turbulent and difficult year will leave Russian observers eager to watch Putin’s fresh New Year’s surprises.

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