When the tower of Ostankino burned like a torch in the sky of Moscow, the Russians witnessed another sign that the empire was in ruins. In the fall of 2000, the 540-meter building that housed the television antennas and whose architectural modernity hid the lack of minimum security measures burned down. A few days earlier, the K-141 Kursk nuclear submarine had been turned into a steel tomb with 118 corpses at the bottom of the Barents Sea.
It was named after the famous battle in which the Red Army it triumphed over the troops of Nazi Germany and was the jewel of the Russian naval forces because its double hull and technical sophistication made it considered unsinkable. However, after the launch of two salvo torpedoes, this formidable ship of 154 meters in length began to explode inside and sank to the seabed. To the lack of maintenance that caused the accident, was added the lack of instruments to rescue the divers. These signs of an empire in ruins added to the defeats that the army had suffered in Afghanistan and in the Caucasus.
The Afghan mujahideen had defeated him in the Hindu Kush mountain range and in the Bamiyan desert, and the independence fighters led by General Dudayev had proclaimed the Republic of Ichkeria and were setting out to conquer Ingushetia and Dagestan after making General Lebed sign the capitulation in Chechnya. At that height, Vladimir Putin He had just arrived at the presidency after having ordered, as prime minister, the dilapidated government of Boris Yeltsin, a president who, due to his heart problems and his alcoholism, had caused a desperate political drift.
That tragic year with which the 21st century began was the turning point. With Putin the victories began that restored self-esteem to Russia. With the government in order, the economy, which had been in a permanent short circuit since the economist and deputy prime minister Anatoly Chubais launched the privatization process, the first stage of which had been chaotic, also began to order itself. Putin maintained the march towards capitalism, which was ordered to the extent that the authority of the country was recomposed. An authority that the president brutally imposed when attacked by Islamist terrorism.
As in 2002, when he recaptured the Dubrovka Moscow theater, occupied by terrorists led by Movsar Barayev, at a high price in civilian casualties. And two years later, when he again sent Spetsnaz special forces Alpha Group to battle inside a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, where ultra-Islamists had taken hundreds of children hostage with their teachers and parents in the first day of class. Also there victory was achieved at a very high cost in innocent lives, most of children. The next victory was reaped in Georgia, when after the Revolution of the Roses that ended the pro-Russian government of Eduard Shevardnadze, the nationalist Mikhail Saakashvili came to power and tried to restore Georgian sovereignty over Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
He would then add a military triumph in the Middle East, where he sent troops to save the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, which was being swept away by rebel militias. He can even boast of having put in a president of the United States, since his hacker squad successfully attacked Hillary Clinton’s campaign by helping Trump get into the Oval Office. Probably as many wins they made him triumphant. The truth is that, for the first time since he came to the pinnacle of power, the specter of defeat haunts the gigantic Russia.
That excess of triumphalism made him risk decades of economic stability and the record of private investments, national and foreign, which occurred from 2013 until he decided to invade Ukraine. The star of the economy who has chaired the Central Bank of Russia for nine years, Elvira Nabiullina, would have submitted his resignation, which was rejected by the president. The reasons for this resignation attempt would be Nabiullina’s opposition to the aggression against the neighboring country that had not attacked Russia, and the devastating consequences that this expansionist war would have for the Russian economy. For the same reasons Anatoly Chubais resigned from the international representation of Russia in sustainable development.
The economist who discovered Putin’s cold lucidity and opened the doors of the Yeltsin government to him now points out the catastrophic human and economic consequences that an unnecessary and brutal decision will have. It is possible that this decision has started a drift with an uncertain ending. Putin was always a criminal and he demonstrated it with poisonings and bullet wounds. But his cold lucidity always contained the turbulent emotions that mobilize him towards ambitious goals. The decision to invade a country that had not attacked Russia in any way generated a paradoxical situation: even if Putin wins his war in Ukraine, Russia will lose the economic war imposed by the Western powers in response.
With the bombings and the advance of his army on Ukrainian territory, Putin tries that the treatment of the Western powers to Russia has to do with its military power and not with the size of its economy. And economic sanctions are the missiles used by NATO members against Russia’s weak flank. In the economy are the feet of clay of the Eurasian giant and that is where the sanctions impact. The Euro-American axis is damaging the business fabric, the financial system, and the fortunes of the so-called “oligarchs”, so that the upper echelons of the Kremlin and the Russian economy soon come to the conclusion that they must get rid of Putin before losing him. all because of him.
For the first time since he became president, the specter of defeat haunts the corridors of the Kremlin. Even military defeat has begun to look possible, despite the overwhelming military superiority of the invading army. Instead of disbanding by allowing the invaders to triumphantly enter kyiv, the Ukrainian resistance thwarted attempts to occupy the capital to install a puppet regime, forcing the Kremlin to give up that part of its plan. Vladimir Putin already burned his ships. He only has to advance towards his goals of territorial expansion. He can achieve them, but he will increase and prolong Russia’s isolation and its disconnection with the European economy and with much of the West. Ergo, this time Putin’s triumph will aggravate Russia’s defeat.
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