Vladimir Putin has been here before. He has been presented with the bad news yet again, that Russian officials are responsible for grotesque loss of life, as a result of their own sheer incompetence. Yet again, Putin now finds himself feeling infuriated, humiliated, betrayed—and of course, blameless.
Russia has not been governed efficiently at any point in its history. The nation today finds itself ruled by a curious monster of Putin’s creation—an all powerful but hideously corrupt bureaucracy, an imperial creature, unanswerable to anybody outside the office of the President, ruling autocratically over the population, but rendered laughably incompetent by its own metastasizing corruption.
Putin’s disasters all come back to this—the inability of the Russian state to deliver reliable government, without accidents, or these horrific screw ups. In 2010 various global governance and corruption indicators showed that Russia was almost as corrupt as Papua New Guinea, with the property rights of Kenya, as easy to do business in as Uganda, and as uncompetitive and monopoly ridden as Sri Lanka. Last year it was ranked the world’s 127th most corrupt nation out of a total of 177.
Putin’s rule has been punctuated by tragedies: from the sinking of the Kursk submarine (2000), to the Nord-Ost theater siege (2002), and the Beslan school massacre (2004), all well known in the West. Then there are those accidents that are painfully remembered in Russia, such as Sayano–Shushenskaya power plant explosion (2009), and the deadly Moscow smog and rampaging forest fires (2010).
In all these cases, the same bureaucratic malpractices killed large numbers of Russians: Putin’s developing dictatorship has eliminated all transparency, and chucked out any checks and balances. At the same time its incredible corruption has frozen the system in a state of untouchable incompetence. Now, they have sent this stealth intervention force in to Ukraine and it has completely screwed up. In the initial aftermath of the crash, Russian State TV was initially boasting that the rebel forces had shot down a Ukrainian military aircraft and then had to quickly alter their report.
The last point, for Russians, has always been the real rub: watching their officials, simply sneer at them, blinking and pretending nothing has happened, when really there should be Presidential apologies and heads should roll. Each of these disasters, one by one, has built up Russians’ anger towards the country’s autocratic and out of touch elite.
Vladimir Putin has dealt with each of these national tragedies in a similar fashion: with self-pity and hysterical accusations that sinister behind the scenes forces are driving them. The President has felt himself, in every case, let down, misinformed, even tricked—by his public officials and pliant bureaucrats. He has reacted, according to his own officials, with remarkable indulgence and self-pity towards himself, while shifting all the blame onto his minions as if he is somehow not fully responsible—after close to 15 years as Russia’s preeminent ruler.
Vladimir Putin faces exactly the same situation surrounding the downed Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 in Eastern Ukraine. Right up until that fireball crashed and erupted in a sunflower field, Russian forces had been running a remarkably successful undercover war. Those the media referred to as “rebels,” were almost all commanded by undercover Russian officials, armed almost fully by the Russian army, reinforced by Russian mercenaries and brigades of Chechen and Ossetian reinforcements.
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To put it simply, these “rebel” armies, are one of the largest Russian military intelligence operations in a generation. But, it would seem, despite being armed with sophisticated rocket launchers, they were unable to tell the difference between a Malaysian Airlines passenger jet and a Ukrainian military transport plane. This is because, out in the field, the Russian army’s special operation forces (who are supporting the separatist rebels) have been unable to combat the corruption, incompetence and incoherence which brought about the military bungles in Beslan a decade ago when Russian military stormed the besieged school causing horrific chaos and the loss of 334 lives.
Vladimir Putin has reacted to all these Russian disasters the same way: he cannot do empathy. He is not one of those politicians who can connect with the mourners, or turn their grief into his theater, and lead the nation’s tragedy. Rather, he has reacted to each incident, coldly, like someone who cannot understand that he, and not his petty officials, is to blame for Russia’s rotten chain of command.
Russians, are used to being abused, and treated like cattle, by Russia’s rulers. The skin-crawling reports from the crash site of the MH17—tossed corpses, pillaged suitcases, credit cards stolen from the dead—are all unremarkable reports for the Russian public. They know this is how dead bodies are treated by Russian bureaucrats. The difference this time is that those bodies are mostly European corpses, and that self-pitying, Presidential sneer, is looking into the eyes of the West.
