Grigory Yavlinsky’s web-site, 23.12.2018

The President, who has been governing the country for 19 years, in four hours has reported the following:

• Russia needs a breakthrough, but an increase in the retirement age is inevitable.

• We will not have the developments like in France, and gasoline prices will not price.

• The situation in the whole of Ukraine is as bad as in Donbas.

• Relations with Armenia and Turkey are good, while relations with the UK at an impasse.

• [Yevgeny] Prigozhin [the so-called ‘Putin’s cook’, businessman closed to Putin, engaged in a restaurant and catering business, who hosted dinners for Vladimir Putin and is allegedly behind the “factory of trolls” and recruiting mercenaries spotted in Central Africa] is not his chef, and all his cooks serve in the Federal Security Service.

• Russophobia is flourishing in Istanbul and elsewhere.

• His health is all right, but sometimes he may have flu in the offseason.

Here, is probably all that the head of state said at his first big press conference after March 18, almost a year after the [presidential] elections.

And here are the problems directly resulting from Putin’s policies and requiring clarity and response:

1. The threat to the strategic security of the country. Not only destruction of the INF Treaty is on the agenda, but of the entire system of treaties ensuring security. The failure of a defence strategy based on “catching up and overtaking America” in the field of armaments. Putin does not give an answer what to do with this.

2. A possibility of war . There is an escalation of the conflict with Ukraine. But, according to the President, who actually began a hybrid war with Ukraine, invaded Crimea and Donbass, he cannot do anything about it: the Kyiv authorities are to blame for the growth of tension in relations with Ukraine.

3. An arms race . Once this has already led to the collapse of the country. But President Putin, who declared the arms race, cannot do anything about it: the Americans who withdrew from the ABM treaty are to blame.

4. Stagnating economy on the verge of recession. A significant increase in the cost of living and fall in real incomes of Russians are ahead. Sanctions and international isolation, where Putin’s policies have led Russia, are hindering a breakthrough and improving the situation in the economy. And again, the President cannot do anything about it: they are trying to limit us in the competitive world.

5. The real daily life does not improve:

• Putin replies on the question about raising the retirement age, which was first heard only two and a half hours after the start of the event, that there is no other way out. If there were another way out, he would “not allow this”. That is, no one is going to take the economy out of stagnation;

• the President says bluntly that equipment is the most important thing, and the “social sphere will catch up”;

• A huge number of people in Russia still live without gas, but Putin takes the side of Gazprom and explains the importance of revenues from gas exports for the state budget.

6. People do not believe to the state. The huge discrepancy between the official figures, which should testify to the improvement of living standards, and what people see and feel, is the leitmotif of the absolute majority of questions asked to the President. In addition, the President himself confused in the figures: his figures differ from the figures that the Prime Minister has recently voiced. But the questions casting doubt on presidential optimism continued: after Putin’s statements about the rapid growth of agriculture against the background of sanctions, he was asked about the slowdown in the sector, and it was all about the same discrepancy between the official statistics and the observed reality. Obviously, the figures of rapid growth come from some other life.

7. International isolation has been growing. The Kerch incident shows that the Russian authorities exist outside the real context of international life: the Press Secretary of the Russian President is perplexed about the fact that Vladimir Putin’s meeting with Donald Trump was impeded by some “minor” issue about the detained Ukrainian sailors. Russian Defense Minister immediately after John Bolton, Adviser to the American President, quite definitely stated the importance of the subject of captured seamen for bilateral relations, writes a letter to the head of the Pentagon, awaits a response and is surprised that there is no answer.

8. Where are we going? There is no clear perspective. According to the Levada Centre polls, 44 per cent of Russians believe that things in the country go awry, 66 per cent have a negative attitude towards the State Duma, and 67 per cent do not approve of the activities of the Prime Minister. Russians trust the President, but they don’t know where he leads the country and almost half of them strongly doubt that they go in the right direction. Incidentally, this applies primarily to that part of the population, which in all respects can be considered voters and supporters of Putin, which is a direct consequence of the victory of the absolute minority in the elections of March 18. The overwhelming majority of those who voted for Putin have lost. They start being aware of this now.

The most important thing that Putin’s press conference confirmed was the futility in place of the national development strategy, the lack of a vision for the future. There are proposals to create a “ministry of ideas of the Russian Federation” or to launch on TV shows on strategically important issues of Russia’s development. And it is not funny. In fact, the future, the strategy, the direction of the country’s development are absent from the national agenda. The answers that Putin is trying to close this topic with suggest that he cannot do anything in this key issue for the country. He simply repeats the words about the “breakthrough”, the need to “jump into the new technological order, without which the country has no future.” Actually Putin says “We have to do something about it”.

But how to do it? Where does effectiveness come from? How fundamentally achievable are these tasks under the conditions created by foreign and domestic policies? All this remains even without a hint of an answer. The methods of authoritarian-mobilisation industrialisation of the first half of the 20th century are in principle unsuitable. The post-industrial economy, where Putin wants to “break through”, needs free people, creativity and equality before the law. Putin’s system has nothing even close to this.

Consequently, the absence of a national discussion on the most important issues is proposed to be compensated by a special show, and the absence of a long-term vision of national development – by the “Ministry of Ideas”. The content and context of the President’s press conference testify to the dysfunction of the state administration, the institutional crisis of the Putin’s state, which is unable to fulfill its duties. And Putin, too, can not do anything about it.

In general, all this is represents a concentrated expression of a dead end, which Russian politics, economy and diplomacy have been brought to by the beginning of 2019: the country’s leadership has no vision of prospects, but there is a danger of a real war.

Such are the results of the year, or rather, 19 years of Putin’s rule.

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