Carnegie Moscow Center
To the Kremlin, Assad is not the source of the problem in Syria—he is actually the way to solve it.
Russia’s political elites and, particularly, its president have no strategic vision of the future and no adequate assessment of reality. The authorities are seeking to prolong the inertia model until the presidential elections in 2018, but afterwards the Kremlin will need strategic decisions.
The fact that the Kremlin has stepped up its military assistance to Syria demonstrates that Moscow has no intention of withdrawing its support from Assad.
While the Kremlin continues to score plenty of tactical victories in the political sphere, the regime has demonstrated no ability to think strategically. The lack of strategic thinking stems from the elites’ desire to preserve their own power and the whims of an authoritarian political system.
Putin’s recent theatrics indicate a plan to run for re-election in 2018. But despite his lack of opponents, Russia’s current problems make the path to re-election more complicated this time around.
The joint public work-out by Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev sent a political message to the elite and the general public. Loyal professionals are required to deal with the current crisis and the president needs his prime minister again.
If you look at the entire 15 years that Putin has been in power, rather than just the last year and a half, you can see that this is the fourth time his popularity has soared this high. Furthermore, there are simultaneous changes in various indicators, which makes for a more complicated picture than what most observers see
Russia is a superpower in decline, and the challenge it poses to the United States is very different from that posed by the Soviet Union.
Putin phoned IMF chief, asking the Europeans to support Athens in any way possible. It is likely that Obama asked to do the same thing: there is no indication that Greece was ever a point of contention between Russia and the United States—despite Greece’s position on the Ukrainian crisis, its anti-Western rhetoric, and Tsipras’ friendship with Putin
Thanks to the carelessness of officials, what at first was a purely technical question of rescheduling Russia’s 2016 parliamentary elections from December to September snowballed into a political scandal that landed at the feet of Russian President Vladimir Putin