Laura A. Henry and Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom, in another new PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo, add the near-term prospect for climate action to the often forgotten list of war casualties, a particularly depressing turn due to the potential for improved Russian policy just prior to the war.
In discussing the war’s effect on academic freedom and the persecution of scientists, Brian Taylor writes that the Kremlin security services are driven by performance quotas but are also populated by officials trying to build their careers or make money through the cases they pursue. Marlene Laruelle argues it is still incorrect to apply the “fascism” label to the entirety of the Russian state or society, claiming it reinforces confirmation bias and is monocausal whereby everything bad happening in Russia is read through the sole analytical lens of “fascism.”
As rumors about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s health spark succession questions and multiple rival clans vie for power in Moscow, Yuri Zhukov writes that if Putin resigns, dies, or is removed from office, the Russian Constitution states that the prime minister becomes acting president. Taylor hedges that while the current Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin would be the “path of least resistance” to assume the presidency in an emergency, he may not last long-term without the support of elites. Volodymyr Ishchenko, notes that only “some dramatic changes,” such as a major retreat or defeat, would trigger anti-Putin protests and Gulnaz Sharafutdinova attributes much of the Russian citizens’ indifference to the Putin regime’s social contract in which people focus on bettering their own lives while leaving politics to the state.
Nargis Kassenova writes that as the geopolitical division between Moscow and the West widens, Kazakhstan will have a hard time being a good neighbor both to isolated Russia and to the rest of the world.
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PONARS Eurasia is an international network of scholars advancing new approaches to research on security, politics, economics, and society in Russia and Eurasia. The program is based at the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at the George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. PONARS Eurasia is supported in part by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York.
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