JUST AS 2016 DEFINED THE POLITICS OF ITS decade, so 2024 has the potential to send an electroshock to political consensus in the 2020s. It starts with Russia. Vladimir Putin’s crusade for a fifth term in office is preordained, but not pro forma. One had only to take in the Wagner Group warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin’s quixotic attempt at a power grab last June to understand that politics in an autocracy is complicated.
As Dmitri Tremin, the pro-Putin former director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Moscow Center, put it; “It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that Russia is run and largely owned by the same people.” As a senior Russian official separately observed: “Russia has privatised politics.”
Putin is not invincible — the battlefield performance in 2022 was a demoralising failure for the Kremlin — but he remains notably undefeated. Though Putin marches toward a Stalin-length tenure, he does not preside over a
