“He’s not doing well.” The survival of Alexei Navalny, the imprisoned Russian dissident and President Vladimir Putin’s top political nemesis, has become a matter of international concern and fascination.
. Two separate show trials followed, with Navalny convicted on fictitious charges of corruption that could keep him in prison for more than 11 years.
Volkov’s core conviction — the conviction that gives both him and Navalny hope — is that support for the year-old invasion of Ukraine is vastly overstated. And that as support continues to erode, Putin’s grip on Russia will collapse. The collapse will be messy, and perhaps violent. But a better Russia will emerge.
Volkov disagrees, pointing to polling conducted by the Anti-Corruption Foundation that suggests the exasperation with war in Ukraine is reaching an unsustainable level . He and others have argued that protestsordered by Putin were notable precisely because they did not take place in St. Petersburg and Moscow, but, rather, in the vast hinterlands where the Kremlin generally expects near-unilateral support or at least resigned, fatalistic compliance.
Skeptics may point to Putin’s approval ratings, which remain remarkably high. No less remarkable has been the resilience of the Russian economy, which the West’s sanctions have not managed to collapse. And while Twitter memes may sometimes make it seem like Ukrainian forces are daily on the cusp of a historic rout, the war has been a grinding affair for both sides. Ukraine has to labor consistently to keep the Western coalition from crumbling.
Former president Dmitry Medvedev — who served in the position during a four-year interregnum during which Putin was constitutionally required to relinquish the office he has otherwise held without interruption for more than two decades — has tried to reclaim some of his influence with the kind of fire-and-brimstone fulminations that seem more fitting for the early Cold War days.
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