Empty chairs in St. Petersburg reflect the hollowness of Putin's message

A lot of empty chairs in St. Petersburg

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President Putin excoriated the West, the US in particular, at the annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on Friday (June 17) (well, international, not so much as high profilers from past years avoided the event like the plague.  Putin continues to attack Ukrainian sovereignty and has recently claimed that in attacking Ukraine, Russia is merely reclaiming its historic lands, which, by the way, include the Baltics states and Poland.  Back in April, I had written "...who can say that Putin, the new Czar, without checks on his behavior from an independent civil society, did not imagine a new Livonian war, the conquest of Poland and the Baltics after Ukraine."  Putin at the St. Petersburg forum is the Czar unleashed.  He declared the US a declining power with a collapsing economy and diminishing influence around the globe.  Much of what he said was shrill, emotional, and not a little panicky.

Where this leaves Russia is hard to say.  Russia's military power is being savaged in Ukraine, exposing its weakness as a global--or even regional--power.  While unprecedented sanctions have not collapsed the Russian economy, the cost of its invasion of Ukraine is a huge burden to its economy that will continue into the indefinite future as the cost of holding conquered territory will be equally as high as conquering it. Meanwhile, the limits on trade with the West will slowly erode Russia's economic growth in absolute terms and relative to other, faster-growing economies.  If Putin is right that a new world order is emerging, Russia is unlikely to be a major military or economic power in that new world.

With military and economic decline, Russian society will be under immense strain.  Russian soldiers in Ukraine, as a reflection of contemporary Russian society "...today brutalize, rape, murder, and shit where they tread."  I had written also that "Russian civil society has not dealt with the ineptitude, corruption, and brutality of authoritarian government in Russia’s recent history", which undermines social cohesion every bit as much as economic decline...Putin has had it easy because Russian society is unreconciled to its past, which makes it susceptible to the strongman promises of order and security.  Russian society is fragile because it has never experienced a catharsis of truth and, therefore, underestimates the high cost of an authoritarian government.  Russia needs what other societies have experienced, a truthful accounting of the past in order to build a proper relationship between society and the state where society legitimates state policy rather than accepting dictates by the state.

What Russian society does not need is more lies from Putin.