Protests in Russia – week 2

 

Well, not really week 2 of protests in Russia as there has been protests going on in Kharborovsk since July 2020. There are also still scattered protests in Belarus and there have been pro-Belarus (anti-Lukashenko) protests in St. Petersburg. Protests are actually becoming quite common in the FSU (Former Soviet Union).

Anyhow, certainly tens of thousands of protestors showed up across the nation over the weekend. The Russian government sealed off downtown Moscow, so as to avoid the optics of tens of thousands of protestors in and around Pushkin Square. Over 5,000 protesters were detained/arrested in rather heavy handed police tactics.

Meanwhile, the Aleksei Navalny video has 107 million views.

Picture above is from St. Petersburg, courtesy of Reuters/Anton Vaganov.

Anyhow, it is hard to see how this resolves. It is large and virulent and in the middle of winter. What reforms and changes to does Putin offer to calm down the protests? An anti-corruption campaign when he is clearly at the center of it? Sell the palace that he supposedly does not own? Release Navalny? Institute democratic reforms? I suspect he has no choice but to continue arresting protestors each weekend until they tire. This could go on for a while. I also fully expect the protests in Belarus to continue. I am guessing that more people will start coming out as the weather gets better. Also, the protests have occurred in over 70 cities in Russia, so it is kind of widespread.

Not sure this is the end of Putin’s regime….but I do think he and his large collection of cronies will be pretty uncomfortable for a while. They got too corrupt for their own good.

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Christopher A. Lawrence
Christopher A. Lawrence

Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.
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Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.
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His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) , The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019), The Battle for Kyiv (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2023), Aces at Kursk (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024), Hunting Falcon: The Story of WWI German Ace Hans-Joachim Buddecke (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024) and The Siege of Mariupol (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2024).
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Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.

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2 Comments

  1. Putin has been in power for over 20 years. Is it possible that the Russian people are growing tired of him and actually are not afraid of protesting his government ?

    • Well, their economy is not doing well and has not been for a while. So there is a lot of underlying content. Don’t know the nature and extent of it. One poll I recently saw (and polling is always a little hard to trust in Russia) it said that 26% of Russian had seen Navalny’s Putin Palace video and that 55% believed it was true.

      There were no protests this weekend. I gather when the weather gets better (when Spring comes) we will see more protests in both Russia and Belarus. Still, hard to say the extent and depth of them. Are people angry enough yet to brave the detentions, arrests and casualties that will invariably come with this? Russia was detaining/arresting over 5,000 protestors each week. In the case of Ukraine in 2013/2014…the protestors braved snipers that killed more than a hundred of them so they could remove Yanukovich. Not sure we are at that level yet.

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