LONDON: Last month, on the day Vladimir Putin was sworn in for his fifth term as president, a group of experts met in Berlin to discuss various scenarios on the future of Russia. While they were deliberating, Putin was taking the long walk through the grand Kremlin palace to the St Andrew’s Throne Hall where he took the oath and was sworn into office for a new six-year term. ‘‘We are a united and great people,’’ claimed Putin. ‘‘Together we will overcome all obstacles, we will bring our plans to fruition, and together we will win’’. Putin didn’t define the obstacles, nor did he reveal any plans.
In fact, Russia’s major obstacle is self-inflicted – the war in Ukraine. Far from being the short two to three week ‘‘special military operation’’, which Putin expected on the advice of his military chiefs, this illegal invasion of a sovereign country is turning into a ‘‘forever war’’, with no end in sight.
While Putin was speaking, a thousand miles away to the West the experts in Berlin were looking at a number of alternative scenarios for Russia’s future. They were not short of recent studies to help generate ideas. Last September the Netherlands Institute for International Relations, Clingendael, published ‘‘After Putin, the Deluge’’. In February the Atlantic Council published ‘‘Five Scenarios for Russia’s Future’’. And in April the American historian Stephen Kotkin published his ‘‘The Five Futures of Russia’’.
Russia’s official version of its future is as a victorious, retrenched imperialist power, a kind of perpetual Putin regime and political system. An optimistic but extremely unlikely alternative scenario is that a reformed Russia reconciles with the West, the polar opposite of the present. Some experts believe that, as Vladimir Putin is morphing into his hero Joseph Stalin, another scenario is that Russia will become an isolated neo-Stalinist North Korea-like hermit kingdom, once again experiencing full-scale gulags. A fourth perilous scenario is that after Putin’s death and following a steady decline, Russia descends into civil war, anarchy and chaos. A dangerous variation of this scenario is the sudden decline of Russia, resulting in ‘‘loose nukes and warlords’’. The most likely future of Russia, however, is as a weak and dependent junior partner, or even a vassal, of China.
Ten days after his inauguration as Russia’s president for the fifth time, Vladimir Putin made a two-day trip to China, his fourth visit since the start of the war in Ukraine. It was Putin’s first international visit after the election to a country which has been a lifeline to Russia as it faces a plethora of sanctions from the United States and its Western allies, aimed at crippling Moscow’s war machine. Beijing has adamantly refused to join the West’s sanctions against Russia, choosing instead to prop up the Putin regime. This has inevitably led to Russia’s growing dependency on the People’s Republic of China and a deepening of economic ties between the two countries.
Since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Sino-Russian trade has reached record heights. Total trade turnover ballooned from a pre-war record of $147 billion in 2021, to $190 billion in 2022, and then to £241 billion in 2023. Notably, this trade has rapidly become yuan-based, accelerating the de-dollarisation of the Russian economy that started in response to the Western sanctions imposed in 2014, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its armed support to the rebels in Ukraine’s Donbass region. As there is significant asymmetry between the two countries in terms of their population and economies, especially in their level of technology and industrial output, it’s not surprising that in 2023, China accounted for 37 percent of Russia’s imports, whereas Russia made up just 4 percent of China’s foreign trade. While China has become by far Russia’s main trade partner, the same cannot be said in reverse. Which gives Beijing a massive leverage over Moscow.
Russia’s pivot to the East is a recent phenomenon, accelerated by the war in Ukraine. In the 1980s, an affection for the West amplified Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, paving the way for the peaceful breakup of the Soviet Union, an event Vladimir Putin has described as ‘‘the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the century’’. From 1991 to at least the early 2010s, Russia rapidly westernised. In the 1990s, for the first time in its history Western political structures, such as contested elections, political parties and a parliament, became the general political model for Russian leaders, even though the Kremlin subsequently manoeuvred to manage each of these. Russia’s economy became deeply interconnected with European markets, and its popular culture opened itself to Western influence from cuisine to fashion to entertainment. Living in Moscow at the time, I can attest to the enthusiasm and excitement of my Russian friends with their newfound opportunities to sample and even visit the West, after the drab dullness of the Soviet era.
The internet made the West easily accessible to Russians, especially for those without the means to travel to Europe or the United States. Nowhere was Russia’s westernisation more vivid than in Moscow and St Petersburg, which had been renamed Leningrad in 1924 on Lenin’s death, but had its name restored in 1991. In the post-soviet period, both cities had evolved into European megalopolises.
It was in 2000 that the newly elected President Vladimir Putin told the BBC that ‘‘Russia is part of the European culture and I cannot imagine my own country in isolation from Europe and what we call the civilised world’’. He even hinted that he wanted Russia to join NATO. How things have changed!
By the time of Russia’s invasion and annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014, Vladimir Putin had already been seeking to construct a Russia that was increasingly anti-Western in political form, a country that could exist apart from, and in conflict with the West. That project dates back to the winter of 2011-12 when Putin was orchestrating his return to the presidency amid large anti-government protests against what many considered to be his transparently rigged election. Newly embattled, Putin strengthened his hold on power in a number of ways: by branding protestors unpatriotic; by increasing the level of domestic political repression; by promoting greater cultural conservatism; and by pursuing an increasingly extreme foreign policy. The annexation of Crimea, however, promoted genuine Russian euphoria which consolidated Putin’s vision for his country, while further alienating pro-Western intellectual and political voices.
Russia’s break with the West is now complete. In fact the new Russian Czar has made anti-Westernism a fulcrum of his domestic policy, presenting the West as dangerously decadent and Western governments as ruthlessly aggressive in their quest to disempower Russia. According to this narrative, promoted widely on state-controlled media, the West is bent on destroying the Russian people through a proxy war. The Kremlin even claimed at the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine that the West had developed biological weapons, pathogens that would be carried by birds, bats and insects into Russia!
The Kremlin now wants to keep the West at bay. In any case, the West has erected a sanctions regime that makes institutional cooperation with Putin’s Russia impossible. No longer able to trade with Europe or harness Western technology, Putin’s pivot to China is seen by the Kremlin as the foundation of Russia’s long-term strength and autonomy. The problem with this policy is that Russia is becoming dangerously dependent on China. Once the war in Ukraine ends or winds down, concern with this dependency is likely to become more pronounced in the Kremlin, as it creates serious risks for Moscow – more than Russia’s reliance on the West did before 2014. Russia’s lack of domestic innovation, shallow capital markets, erosion of human capital because of the war, and reliance on exports of gas and oil at a time when the world is gradually moving away from fossil fuels, will result in an impoverished Russia slowly becoming a vassal state of China.
And here’s the irony. In the 1950s at the beginning of the Cold War, Mao’s China obeyed its Soviet big brother. Stalin had the upper hand. Today the situation is reversed. Within the ‘‘unlimited friendship’’ that Moscow and Beijing claim to have established, Xi Jinping is by far the dominant partner – and getting more so every day.