Sam Green is a British professor who established and led the King’s College Russia Institute in London. He has authored two books about Russia and numerous academic and policy papers. Currently serving as the Director for Democratic Resilience at the Center for European Policy Analysis, he focuses on opposition to Putin, ongoing collaborations between Ukrainian and Russian human rights defenders, notable events in Russia, and the challenge of developing analytical strategies to counter Putin’s influence in Moscow.
– In her last interview, Yulia Navalnaya pointed out the “mistake of Ukraine”, which “does not want to look for anti-war Russians”. What are your thoughts on that?
There are examples of very real cooperation between Ukraine, Ukrainian civil society, and elements of Russian civil society. And I’m not just talking about the Russian refugees or exiles who are now in Europe, who are providing some amount of support for Ukrainian refugees. Or, in some cases, sending money to Ukraine. That’s all wonderful. But it’s maybe not the most important thing.
The most important thing is the work that has been done by mostly human rights organisations in Russia and Russian lawyers to help find Ukrainian children. To help support and get Ukrainian refugees out of Russia to Europe. To help, in some cases, find Ukrainian prisoners and political prisoners who were being held in Russian prisons.
People like Oleksandra Matviichuk have acknowledged that this work is being done. It is very important work, and obviously, it has to be done very quietly. Otherwise, it would be impossible.
I think there’s also a lot of value for Ukraine in the work that some of the independent Russian journalists are doing. Because the reality is that Ukrainian journalists don’t have access to Russia and don’t have access to the other side of the front line. It’s a little bit easier for Russian news organisations like Meduza, for example. They do have some journalists on the ground in Russia. Obviously, they don’t publish with their names because they would get in trouble. But it’s an important source of information and intelligence for Ukraine and the Western governments trying to understand what’s going on inside Russia and what’s going on inside the temporarily occupied territories.
– What about the Russian opposition?
– As for the Russian opposition, it is not a political force at the moment. They don’t have the ability or the opportunity to affect politics in Russia in any meaningful sense. There are some people who have tried. Most of those people are now in jail or in exile. Some of those people are now dead.
The democratic opposition in Russia never had much of the infrastructure. But whatever infrastructure they had was, in fact, destroyed long before the full-scale Russian invasion began. And obviously, they’re under a lot of pressure. Even outside Russia, the reality is that they are subject to attacks by the Russian state even abroad. So those people won’t create change in the near term.
The Russian opposition then makes an argument, which I think is not necessarily wrong: that in the longer term, Ukraine will be safer and will feel safer when there is a democratic government in Russia that is not interested in imperial expansion.
Philosophically, there should be a common course between Ukraine and Ukrainians and those Russians who would like to see Russia develop in a different way. In fact, I think the common course also goes in the other direction. Russian opposition actually wants Russia to lose this war. They don’t want Russia to stop fighting this war; they want Russia to lose the war. Because they believe – and I think they’re probably correct – that without it, Russia will never be able to go through the process of catharsis and self-reflection that is needed in order to reject the ideology. And to move in the other direction. If you think about what Germany went through after WW2, they had to lose the war for that to happen.
And I think that’s remarkable. If you think about Americans during the Vietnam War, for example, who were very much opposed to the war. But they weren’t calling for Vietnam to defeat the USA; they were just calling for the US government to stop fighting and to bring the truth out.
Or me. I opposed the second invasion of Iraq (I wasn’t really old enough to oppose the first invasion of Iraq). But that doesn’t mean I was hoping for Saddam Hussein to defeat the US military and to kill as many US soldiers as possible, right?
So it’s really a remarkable thing when you hear Russian opposition figures say: “Actually, we want Russia to lose. We want Ukraine to get back its territories, and to defeat the Russian military, and to make it clear to the Russian people that what Putin did was a mistake”.
Not everyone in the Russian opposition believes that. But it is, I think, the majority opinion.
The other thing, however, is that the Russian opposition and the Russian civil society need to learn a new language. They will need to learn a new language to listen to Ukrainians about what Ukraine has gone through so that they can understand the degree of trauma that they have inflicted… That Russia has inflicted on Ukraine. So that they can learn first to listen and then to respond in a constructive manner. To be able to talk to themselves and their fellow Russian citizens about the moral responsibility that Russia and ordinary Russians bear for this war. And for the other things that the Russian government has done in their name and, in some cases, with their support.
They will also need to learn a new language to talk internally about the subjugation of other people in Russia, to have a new conversation about Russian federalism, and a new conversation about the North Caucasus and the ethnic republics.
When (and if) Russia becomes a country in which people from Chechnya, or people from Tatarstan, or people from Yakutia are equal citizens with ethnic Russians – then that is a country that is less threatening to Ukraine. That is a country that is less threatening to Europe and the world. So I think that Ukrainians also have interest in seeing that succeed.
But is there anything that Ukrainians can do to help that succeed? Probably not.
– How stable do you think the situation in Russia is at the moment? We’ve always been hoping for some kind of a miracle to happen, that we’ll witness something significant happening over there. And that “something” did start a few times! But never ended in an interesting way…
– Oh, it always ended in an interesting way. It’s just that afterwards, things get worse again.
I don’t know the answer to that question. So, if we look at everything that has happened in Russia since the full-scale invasion… Internal political competition among parts of the regime about the war, the conflict between Prigozhin and Shoigu, for example, the fact that they put people like Girkin in jail. The death of Navalniy. The terrorist attack a few weeks ago. The fact that those elections were so tightly controlled in order to deliver the results. I can look at all of that – and say that It means that this regime is incredibly fragile. It keeps creating problems for itself. Each of those crises creates the potential for a catastrophic loss of confidence among the elites and among the Russian people, as well as Putin’s ability to keep the show on the road.
The problem is I can look at exactly the same stuff—Prigozhin, Crocus, and Girkin—all of those “wonderful” things that have happened—and say: look, all of this has been managed by the system. None has created any kind of popular dissatisfaction.
There are Ukrainian drone attacks, hitting Russian cities on a regular basis, some of which have hit civilian areas. And it hasn’t caused, as far as we can tell, anybody in Russia to say: “Look, maybe this is not a good idea”.
I can look at exactly the same areas and come to exactly opposite conclusions. I can say that actually Putin is quite strong and is able to keep everything under control. And that even all of these disasters haven’t really had an impact on his ability to rule the country and support the war.
Analytically, I can’t make a reasonable judgement about whether this war has made Putin stronger or weaker. We will find out after the war and probably after Putin goes. The reality with authoritarian regimes, in general, is that they are always strong until the moment that they collapse.
Because what keeps them in power is not their ability to control everything. What keeps them in power is the confidence that everybody else has that they’re in control. As soon as that confidence collapses – the regime collapses. That confidence is psychological; that confidence is created in the conversations between millions of people around their millions of tables. Not in the behaviour of the police in the streets or the behaviour of the FSB behind them.
The one piece of advice I would give to the Western governments and to the Ukrainian government. Because we don’t understand whether the regime is strong or weak, it’s a mistake to try to win the war in Moscow. We do understand what makes the Russian military strong or weak on the frontlines. We do understand what makes the Ukrainian military strong or weak on the frontlines.
So, if I had a choice between spending my time and effort on something that I do understand or spending it on something that I don’t understand, it shouldn’t be a difficult calculation. But because the war is messy and costs a lot of money, you sometimes have the Western politicians say – wouldn’t it be nice to just create the circumstances in which somebody would push Putin over? And that would be the end of it!
And yes. It would be nice.
But it’s a shot in the dark. Our analytical capabilities – and I’m the person to say this after I’ve spent many decades studying Russia – are not strong enough to be able to make that calculation.
