Putin's Newest Annexation Is Dire for Russia Too

Vladimir Putin today announced his annexation of four provinces of Ukraine—four provinces that he does not fully control, that did not vote to join Russia, that have been the site of mass murder and mass deportation since Russia invaded Ukraine in February. The Russian president also declares war with this statement. This is not just a war against Ukraine.

Putin’s war—Russia’s war—is also a war on a particular idea of world order and international law, an idea upheld not just by Europeans and North Americans, but by most of the rest of the world, indeed by the United Nations itself. One core principle of this world order is that larger countries should not be able to grab parts of smaller countries, that mass slaughter of whole populations is unacceptable, that borders have international significance and cannot be changed through violence or on one dictator’s whim. This idea was already challenged by Putin in 2014 when he annexed Crimea. He also held a sham referendum at that time, but many outsiders believed it had some validity. Although there were some sanctions that followed, the rest of the world gave him a pass. Commerce and diplomacy continued with Russia.

Putin can no longer pretend that the farcical ballots he staged in Donetsk and Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson have any validity. And no one believes they do. The scenario was as follows: Armed men went from house to house collecting so called ballots. Some people left homeless by the war were bribed to vote. It is impossible to imagine a vote taking place in a region where hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens are deported, killed, or evacuated. While Putin was in Moscow, the Ukrainians announced they were surrounding and removing a large number of Russian soldiers from Lyman, a strategically important city in Donetsk.

Russia’s actions under these circumstances show contempt not only for international lawyers in European capitals, but also for Chinese politicians who like to talk about sovereignty and African diplomats who have agreed that borders matter, even when they are arbitrary. Putin will claim that Ukrainians are attacking Russia by defending their land and people in an upside-down reality. He will even raise the stakes, will try to frighten Ukraine and the West by calling Ukraine’s self-defense an existential threat to Russia that requires an extraordinary response—perhaps even a nuclear response, echoing a threat he has made repeatedly since he began his invasion.

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This annexation is more than a declaration against the democratic world. It is a declaration of contempt for democracy. Putin has used fake parties, created fake opponents and rigged elections to treat democracy as a tool for many decades. For a long time, he and his spin doctors promoted a form of “managed democracy,” a system that allowed some space for public opinion, while at the same time ensuring that he always remained in power. With today’s announcement, he no longer pretends or plays games. This deliberate farce mocks the idea of referendums, of voting, or popular opinion. This act is completely without legitimacy, which is also part of its point. In his world, legitimacy is not possible. Only brutality is important.

This annexation is the culmination of a two decade-long war against any Russians who have a different vision of their country. Some of those Russians belong to ethnic minority groups—Dagestanis, Buryat, Tuvans, Crimean Tatars, all of whom have been subject to vigorous mobilization drives, as if Putin wants to use his genocidal war against Ukraine to eliminate them as well. Some people simply want to live in a country with different rules, that doesn't have any murderous plans on its neighbors, and that is not a threat to the rest of the world. Even though thousands of these people fled the country in the past decade, the invasion intentionally sparked a new exodus. Putin’s propagandists have celebrated the departure of anti-war Russians as a form of cleansing; Putin himself has said that the nation should “spit them out like a midge that accidentally flew into their mouths.”

The crackdown on domestic dissent has increased since the war started. This is because the war provides the context for treason and any criticism of war is a crime. Newspapers, websites and social-media channels have been shut down. For protesting, more than 16,400 Russians were detained in prison. Some protesters received draft notices in the last few days after being taken into jail. Others are the focus of special efforts in order to weaken and destroy them. Alexei Navalny is the Russian politician who was closest to creating an anti-Putin, grassroots prodemocracy movement. He received a nine year sentence in May and is currently in a maximum security prison. As punishment for minor (or even invented) violations of jailhouse rules, he has spent the last few weeks in isolation. He is not allowed to talk to or even look at other inmates. His anti-corruption foundation, which he is an unpaid member on its advisory board, continues to function in exile. And when he was allowed to speak in an internal prison court last week, Navalny responded to Putin’s call for the mobilization of military reservists without mincing words: “It is already clear that the criminal war that is going on is getting worse and deeper, and Putin is trying to involve as many people as possible in this. He wants to smear hundreds of thousands of people in this blood.”

Vladimir Kara-Murza is another opposition politician, who played a key role in campaigning to individual sanctions. He is also in prison and remains as determined. “It continues to amaze me,” he told an interviewer via smuggled messages, “how many serious Western analysts buy the Kremlin’s propaganda on the ‘overwhelming popularity’ of Putin and of the war. If this were true, the authorities wouldn’t need to rig elections, muzzle the media, or imprison and murder their opponents. The Kremlin knows the real situation—and the only thing it has left in the toolbox to prevent protests in Russia is fear.”

Today’s annexation, along with the mobilization that has been launched to defend these occupied territories, has also been designed to increase that fear. The battle against independent thinkers is now expanding beyond Putin’s opponents and is reaching even Russians who felt too distant, too apathetic, or too afraid to protest in the past. If, once upon a time, the threat of the gulag was used to keep all Soviet citizens in a state of permanent fear, the threat of the war in Ukraine is now being used in exactly the same way against Putin’s subjects. Ordinary citizens are now treated as if they were prisoners of war, and untrained, poorly-equipped men are being thrown onto the battlefield, where some are believed to have already died. As new draftees are driven to fields without shelter or food, they remind me of the 1930s when prisoners were abandoned to build their own labor camps. Putin believes, like Stalin that Putin's sinister, unbalanced vision of collective glory is more important than the happiness, well-being and physical existence of ordinary Russians.

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But nothing lasts forever: “Your time will pass,” Navalny told his jailers last week. Kara-Murza, in a prison interview published this week, said the same thing: “None of us knows exactly how and when the Putin regime will end—but we know that it will.”

They are correct. We don’t know how and when it will end. We don't know what kind or type of regime it will be. However, there is nothing certain about Putinism and his form of kleptocratic autoritarianism. There is nothing “forever” about the annexation of territories that aren’t even under full Russian control, and none of the people who were at the annexation ceremony today will live forever either. Russia’s sham annexation of Ukrainian land will end, whatever false words are spoken this week.