But when?
For years, Putin has steadfastly refused to mention Navalny, the Kremlin’s most vocal opponent for more than a decade, by name — referring to him as “the Berlin patient” or “this person.” Then, in his speech on Sunday, Putin suddenly deigned to use his adversary’s name, dubbing Navalny’s death in an Arctic penal colony a “sad event.” The Russian president didn’t even bother to shed crocodile tears — naming him was a taunt, a display of power.
And now the Russian opposition is without the larger-than-life Navalny who had mastered the digital age, blending political activism with clever, funny and eye-catching YouTube videos that mock Russia’s political elite and unmask them as corrupt crooks and thieves. “If you really want to defeat Putin, you have to become an innovator, you have to stop being boring,” Navalnaya advised the European Parliament last month. But now the innovative Navalny has gone.
“He was a genius when it came to clever initiatives — and he had a populist, common touch and really understood the social media era,” Khodorkovsky noted to POLITICO.
But even clever memes and stunts like the Navalny-inspired “Noon Against Putin” election protest won’t undermine the Russian leader in a serious way — however much they’re highlighted and applauded in Western newspapers. They can lift dissident morale and irritate the Kremlin, but they won’t engineer Putin’s downfall — or that of the governing system he’s shaped — which, judging by recent opinion surveys from the independent Levada pollster, has the backing of most Russians with a current approval rating of 86 percent. To believe otherwise is just wishful thinking. The absence of any serious mass protest against Putin inside Russia — let alone against his war on Ukraine — speaks volumes. And hard power wins out over soft power.
For some, the lesson to be drawn is that Russians must take up arms. Peaceful opposition is “a dead end,” said Ilya Ponomarev, a former Russian lawmaker-turned-dissident. Ponomarev now lives in Kyiv and is the spokesperson for the Freedom of Russia Legion, a Ukraine-based volunteer militia thought to number around 2,000 Russian dissidents and defectors — although some in the Russian opposition estimate the tally is much lower. “If people won’t touch weapons, it won’t get us anywhere. People will always find excuses to do nothing, but we need to fight,” he told POLITICO.
He also lamented the “Noon Against Putin” protest, which saw opposition-minded Russians exhorted by Yulia Navalnaya to spoil their ballot papers or write in her late husband’s name. According to Ponomarev, this only boosted participation in the sham election and allowed Russian state media to broadcast footage of voters lining up at polling stations, adding to a false impression of legitimacy. Rather, he has urged Navalnaya, as well as other opposition figures like Khodorkovsky and Garry Kasparov, to “establish cooperation across the opposition and decide what to do and what not to do — that’s what I told her.” But she hasn’t responded to his appeal.
“I assume she will continue down the path of her husband and not collaborate with others in the opposition. Where people don’t want to cooperate, I think they aren’t interested in securing a victory but are carving out separate roles for themselves, and are putting personal benefits before the benefits for all,” Ponomarev added. Meanwhile, Khodorkovsky sees Ponomarev’s proposed strategy of violent upheaval as unrealistic and doomed to fail.
However violent or peaceful, Russia’s opposition seems an irrelevance, no matter how much it’s talked up by some commentators in the West, hoping to raise spirits. “Russia’s prodemocratic opposition was largely a spent force well before February 2022,” analysts from the Center for European Policy Analysis argued in their recent “Containing Russia, Securing Europe” report. And while many of these individuals now continue the fight from abroad and “play an important role in helping to get information in and out of Russia, supporting Ukrainian and Russian refugees, and advocating on behalf of political prisoners, as well as organizing largely futile acts of resistance on the ground, there is little sense that any of these efforts can bring about a change in the makeup or direction of the Russian regime,” they wrote.
So, what does all this mean for Ukraine and the West?
It means that Russia’s defeat in Ukraine is the only realistic goal. This would not only allow Ukraine the sovereign right to choose its own destiny, but it would also deter Putin from further aggression — and it might just save Russia too, being the one thing that could potentially shift the country’s political dynamics. But for such victory to be achieved, the West has to gird itself, accelerate weapons provision and military assistance, and help Ukraine weather the soon-to-come Russian offensives that will likely target Kharkiv and Odesa, as well as build up for another heave to try and push Russia out.
Wishful thinking that Putin’s days are numbered and that a meme will bring him tumbling down need to be pushed aside. It’s time to get deadly serious, Mykhailo Podolyak, a political adviser to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, told POLITICO. “Because time favors Russia, not Ukraine.” Because “on the Russian side, they’re adapting for a long war; they have rebuilt their country completely with war in mind. It’s an authoritarian country that’s completely under the control of the power vertical. The first priority is Russia must be defeated,” he said.
From Putin’s point of view, “If Russia loses, it will undergo a transformation inside. If it wins, it will will dominate Europe.