At the urging of President Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s lower house of Parliament passed legislation Tuesday allowing him to run for a fifth term as president. Putin, who is 67 years old and was first elected in 2000, noted that the legislation would still have to be approved by Russia’s Constitutional Court and in a nationwide plebiscite in April.
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Putin’s single biggest achievement in two decades in power—his true legacy—has been to re-empower the state bureaucracy…No part of this bureaucratic apparatus matters more than the national security establishment—the vast, hydra-headed complex of military, intelligence, and law enforcement ministries. These institutions may well determine not only who becomes the next president of Russia but what Russian politics will look like after Putin.
These days, many people in the Washington foreign policy establishment seem to agree that most of the world’s problems can be put down to either Beijing’s purported insistence on building a new, nefarious world order comprising “all under heaven,” or Moscow’s wily attempts to spread its tentacles everywhere from Madagascar to Libya and possibly even America. Thus, Russian “stooges” and Chinese “useful idiots” are lingering around every corner, so it seems.
When Russians woke up last Wednesday morning, most had likely never heard of Mikhail Mishustin, the head of the country’s tax service. But by the time they went to bed that night, Mishustin had been named as Russia’s new prime minister after a day that included a flurry of proposed changes to the constitution and a series of dramatic shake-ups that saw the government resign en masse. It was the first real inkling of the power transfer to come, with President Vladimir Putin set to reach his constitutionally imposed term limit in 2024.
Primorsky Krai is the eastern most point of East Europe, so east at that point that it stops looking like Europe and starts looking like Asia. So far east, that one tour guide at the state museum of Primorsky Krai, described Vladivostok as the edge of the world, and if the flat earth theory held true, then we’d fall off if we went any further east.
Even with its economy starting to slow down, China’s military is still on the rise. Years of higher military spending fueled by high economic growth are starting to manifest themselves in new technologies and newfound assertiveness. Beijing has made visible strides in its aviation, naval, and missile defense capabilities. Whether it be making territorial claims in the South China Sea or opening up its first overseas military base in Djibouti, China is starting to exert military influence in its near abroad and beyond.
Much of the Kremlin’s self-confidence stems from the belief that the Western world is changing in ways that suit Russia. Donald Trump is seen to represent a long-term trend in the US rather than a short-term blip: Russian analysts reckon that the US will be less focused on intervening around the world to uphold a liberal, rules-based, US-led order, and that it will be more nationalist, mercantilist and interest-focused. So in the long run, the US and Russia should be able to accommodate each other.
China and Russia have signed more than US$20 billion of deals to boost economic ties in areas such as technology and energy following Xi Jinping’s summit with his “best friend” Vladimir Putin. The meeting between the two presidents, who have spoken of their desire to boost practical cooperation in the face of increasing rivalry with the United States, marked the start of Xi’s three-day visit to Russia to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Moscow and Beijing.
The expiration of U.S. sanctions waivers for buyers of Iranian oil exemplifies how difficult it is today, even for the United States, to achieve foreign-policy goals without significant loses. Russia is in a prime position to deliver the oil removed from markets because of U.S. sanctions against Iran, which will result in development of cooperation between Moscow and countries important to American foreign policy. Thus, Russia will gain new leverage against the United States.
The United States and the European Union have steadily ratcheted up sanctions on Russia since its 2014 invasion of Ukraine. The West’s goals include punishing Moscow, pushing it to withdraw from Crimea, deterring it from further aggression, and signaling that national borders must be respected. But a half decade on, what is there to show for all the sanctions?
