Now that Russia is mobilizing 300,000 soldiers to bolster its frontlines in Ukraine,
Vladimir Putin is facing a heightened domestic threat. Like all other autocratic leaders,
Putin needs to maintain the support of handful of political elites to stay in power.
Some of these are hardliners who wish Russia would commit more to winning the war. Others
are moderates that recognize how damaging the
war has been and would prefer that Putin put an end to it.
You might think that this latter group is the bigger threat to Putin’s tenure.
After all, if Ukraine continues to have success with its counterattacks despite
the bolstered Russian front, the moderates have the greater desire to pull out Russian troops,
end the bleeding, and return Russia’s economy to some semblance of normalcy.
Indeed, the most recent coup in Moscow occurred in August 1991,
back when photos were a lot grainier.
This was the failed attempt to unseat Mikhail Gorbachev,
and it was individuals who were upset with the status quo that instigated it.
If Gorbachev were alive today,
he might tell us that the dissatisfied group should be Putin’s primary concern.
But right now, let’s talk about how the hardliners cause a more complicated second problem for Putin.
It all begins with the issues arising from Russia’s mobilization.
In theory, the point of the mobilization is to reinforce Russia’s frontlines,
where Ukraine is increasingly outnumbering them and pressing the counterattack.
The hope for Putin is that the influx of soldiers will allow Russia to hold
control over the precious land bridge into Crimea,
even if Ukraine takes back Kherson and makes further gains up north.
If this works out, Putin’s problems are magically solved,
and the rest of this discussion does not matter.
However, there are many reasons to think that the current plan will fail.
The first issue is that the military status quo
on the ground may be a whole lot worse for Russia than it appears.
This is a fair representation of what the line of
control looked like before the counterattack began.
However, the force deployment actually looked more like this for Russia,
with the goal of protecting Kherson.
Ukraine concentrated its forces toward
the unguarded area and took back territory in the north.
But U.S. intelligence indicates that the Russian military’s leadership is
dissatisfied with this plan, oddly believing it is too aggressive.
Let’s zoom into Kherson. Russian troops occupy the city itself,
but the front lines go further out, somewhat close to the oblast’s border.
Military planners would prefer pulling out of the city and surrounding region altogether.
Ukraine has fired enough artillery to make the bridges across the Dnipro River impassable.
Thus, when Ukraine eventually attacks Kherson, if the final confrontation goes poorly for Russia,
Moscow will lose virtually all of its soldiers and materiel in the process.
That’s a bad outcome for the Russian military.
Nonetheless, Putin wants to stay,
afraid of the political message sent if Russia abandons the city.
Furthermore, it appears that drafted soldiers are barely receiving any training at all,
indicating that the frontlines are in desperate need of reinforcement now.
Defense requires less training than offense, and presumably those mobilized in the short
term will serve as cannon fodder until better-trained soldiers can show up later.
Who actually will train them is another question mark. With so many Russian officers
already in Ukraine, the preparation that new soldiers may receive will be substandard.
Also substandard or outright missing is the corresponding military equipment, thanks to
economic sanctions shutting down the little industry Russia had at the start of the war.
Then there are concerns of how easily Russia will be
able to round up the 300,000 they are looking for,
with Russian citizens leaving by plane,
maybe train?,
and automobile.
Lines at border crossings last hours, and flights out of the country are sold out.
Rumors persist that Russia is closing its borders
to keep its potential soldiers from fleeing, in a renewal of
the Cold War’s Iron Curtain. And those rumors only hasten others to want to leave.
The irony of shutting down the borders
is that it requires soldiers to enforce,
thus further draining resources out of the Ukrainian front lines.
It is also possible that the full mobilization will never come to pass.
Public protests in Russia are mounting, and it is easy to understand why.
The key with protests is safety in numbers.
As long as the public vastly outnumbers security forces on the streets,
the government has a difficult task to repress the masses.
Oftentimes, comparatively small things can still trigger the public to protest.
With the Arab Spring, it was the self-immolation of a street vendor.
With the ongoing protests in Iran,
it was the death of a woman in police custody for violating hijab laws.
Neither of the latter two issues caused immediate concerns for the
bodily safety of the protestors, yet they still ended up on the streets.
With Russia, the threat to the lives of mobilized soldiers is imminent,
which raises the comparative tolerance for risk by protesting.
It will therefore be difficult for Russian security forces to
permanently end the resistance movements there.
So imagine that the mobilization turns into a disaster. The question is what Putin does next.
No matter what, he is in trouble. It is possible he will go quietly into the night,
but it is more likely he will make a last-ditch effort to stay in power.
And that is where the inner circle comes into play.
We don’t actually know what the divisions inside of it look like, nor the balance. For convenience,
I am representing the hardliners using the Russian armed forces flag because they
reasonably prefer a military solution, albeit a smarter one than what is currently happening.
And I am using the FSB’s flag for the relative moderates.
As an intelligence organization, they might prefer returning to the 2014-era covert
manipulation of Ukraine, using “little green men” to influence proceedings.
Whatever the true balance is, there are almost certainly elements of both within the regime.
Now imagine you are Putin and the war has been a disaster.
If you don’t want to have a popular uprising against you, you are going to need a scapegoat.
The hardliners are the obvious choice here—they
wanted to initiate the invasion from the start, so they get the blame.
And that is why the hardliners have a dilemma.
If the hardliners anticipate that Putin is about to purge them,
they have a risky option to exercise: initiate a coup.
The downside risk here is that a failed coup would mean jail or worse for the plotters,
whereas accepting the failure would likely just mean a disgraceful retirement.
The upshot is that a successful coup would allow them to continue in power—
in the process elevating one of them to head of state—and give
them the ability to fight the war in the manner they see fit.
That means pulling out of places where they are
vulnerable like Kherson and instead engage in where they are militarily
favored, thanks to being free from the political constraints Putin is under.
That does not guarantee long-term success, of course.
They would have to repress the moderate elites, who might intervene in support of Putin.
They’d also have to mobilize the country in a way that would not cause a full-on popular
uprising—potentially one defending Putin—all while the country is the middle of intense instability.
That is easier said than done. Meanwhile, the risk of coup gives rise to a couple of
second-order strategic concerns. The first of these is what you might call a meta coup.
To be precise, the hardliners do not initiate a coup because Putin is about to dismiss them.
They do it because they think Putin is going to dismiss them.
That might seem like an academic distinction, but it’s not. Even if Putin has no desire to
get rid of them, they may calculate otherwise and instigate the coup anyway. But now think of
this from Putin’s perspective. Imagine you have no underlying desire to dismiss the hardliners.
But you have heard rumors that the hardliners will be initiating a coup soon.
Now you have an incentive to
preemptively dismiss them so they do not have time to execute that coup.
But now think this from the perspective of the hardliners.
Imagine they actually had no direct interest in removing Putin.
However, they have heard rumors that Putin is planning to remove them.
They may now wish to jump the gun and take preemptive action.
This logic can repeat infinitely to the point that each side is racing to
get rid of the other even though there is no underlying problem between them.
Do not be surprised if we hear rumors about such movements in the media over
the coming days. After all, there is an information war to be fought here.
Beliefs matter just as much as realities. Ukraine and the west therefore would benefit
from sowing the seeds of chaos within the Russian government.
The other second order problem arises if Putin successfully purges the hardliners.
If Putin represents a leadership compromise between the hardliners and moderates,
there is an immediate problem with purging one of the groups:
The other group now has all of the power.
The moderates can now encircle Putin.
And now they no longer have to worry about the hardliners supporting Putin in the event
of a moderate coup. There is no one around to stop them anymore. They have free rein.
This is especially problematic if the divisions are a clean separation between the
armed forces and the FSB. Autocrats love splitting the coercive power among multiple
organizations so that one does not gain the strength necessary to take over the country.
In turn, Putin would have to worry about coup proofing his regime in some other way
to make up for the lack of a counterbalance. It is not obvious where that would come from.
The other choice is to be selective in the purge of the hardliners, finding the right
few to pass off as scapegoats, while leaving enough behind to ward off a moderate coup.
But that handcuffs Putin’s options in a different
way and could still lead to problems with the disgruntled hardliners that remain.
Who do you think is the biggest internal threat to Putin right now? Let me know in the comments.
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