Both Putin and the Syrian dictator were elected in rigged ballots in 2000. Now Bashar Assad sits in exile with a reportedly unhappy wife amidst the cold of a Moscow winter. He has been granted asylum by Putin, but his presence is an unwelcome reminder of the Russian despot’s failed imperial dreams in the Middle East.
Only weeks ago, Assad seemed to the world just as secure as his new host. Now, inevitably, some question whether Putin’s fall might come just as suddenly and unexpectedly.
Retired Russian Col Gen Leonid Ivashov, for example, has long regarded Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a serious blunder that would harm Russia inside and out. Domestically, the general predicted, it would weaken the economy and aggravate the demographic crisis; outside, he warned, it would lose friends for Russia and risk war with NATO. As a Cassandra, he has few equals.
In January 2022, as head of the All-Russian Officers Assembly, Ivashov published a statement condemning Putin’s “criminal policy of provoking a war.” The statement, a month before the all-out war in Ukraine began, called for Putin to resign or be forced out by constitutional procedures.
Blaming Putin for risking “the final destruction of Russian statehood and the extermination of the indigenous population of the country,” Ivashov warned the real danger for Russia was not NATO or the West, but “the unviability of the state model, the complete incapacity and lack of professionalism of the system of power and administration, the passivity and disorganization of society.” Under these conditions “no country survives for long,” he wrote.
Despite the Kremlin’s harsh repression of dissent, Ivashov has continued to post criticism of the invasion, and in December gave a long monologue on UA RUS Online warning that Putin and his Kremlin inner circle could soon suffer the fate of Assad’s regime.
No friend of the West, Ivashov said Russia’s decline began when Mikhail Gorbachev permitted East Germany to escape the empire, and regimes allied with Moscow then collapsed domino-like across Central and Eastern Europe. Yugoslavia disintegrated and Saddam Hussein fell, followed by Moscow-friendly regimes in Libya and elsewhere, he said.
Syria’s army refused to fight in late 2024 and the same thing could happen in Russia, Ivashov has warned. “Our regime is no more stable than others that have been overthrown. Ours could fall as suddenly as Assad’s,” he said. “I see no grounds for optimism.”
The general isn’t alone. Viktor Alksnis, a retired Air Force colonel, said the Syrian debacle was a major defeat for Russia. Alksnis said Moscow thought Assad was a son of a bitch but believed he was “our SOB.” It was a mistake to intervene and turn Syria into a “colony,” he said. For 10 years, Russia supplied Assad with costly military equipment and aid — all for naught.
Alksnis was quoted on Kanal13 as expecting Russia’s capitulation in Ukraine. If NATO entered the war, Russia would fall on the first day of combat, he said.
In the 1930s, Alksnis’s grandfather, Yakov Alksnis (Latvian: Jēkabs Alksnis) was the head of the Soviet Air Force. He was one of the military judges to sentence Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky to death, only to be arrested and executed himself eight months later.
His son, Viktor’s father, then suffered discrimination but in time was forgiven after Viktor opposed Latvia’s independence. In turn, Viktor was declared persona non grata by Latvia in 1992 and by Ukraine in 2005.
Like Ivashov, his criticism doesn’t come from a pro-Western position. He represented the Motherland-National Patriotic Union in the Russian Duma and has proposed using the breakaway Moldovan region of Transnistria as a base to restore the Soviet empire.
The Kremlin is also attacked by hawks such as journalist Maksim Kalashnikov, founder of the Angry Patriots Club (it is actually called that), who has derided Putin as an unhinged dummy for not sending more troops to fight in Ukraine. Kalashnikov has published a dozen books in Russian including Putin Incorporated, Hawkish Futurology, and The Bloody 21st Century: Inevitable Catastrophe.
Are the regime’s critics right? In truth, we have no idea. That’s disappointing to its many enemies at home and abroad, but it’s no reassurance for Putin who knows that the end can come with frightening haste.
Walter Clemens is Associate, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, and Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, Boston University. He wrote Blood Debts: What Putin and Xi Owe Their Victims (2023).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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