I woke up Friday morning at 6:50am like I do most mornings. Bleary eyed, I rolled over and grabbed my phone to see if any news had broken overnight. I started to scan the list of notifications as my brain slowly powered on: oh good, my cousin safely touched down in Ethiopia for his layover en route to the DRC…the Memphis Grizzlies upset the Milwaukee Bucks 113-110…Alexei Navalny…
My heart sank before I could even expand the Washington Post push notification. I’d been grimly anticipating this moment for three years: “Alexei Navalny, Russian opposition leader and Putin nemesis, dies in prison, Russian officials say” read the full headline.
To some extent I think everyone who has been following Russia in the twenty-first century knew this execution was inevitable. Hell, Putin’s agents had already tried to assassinate the Anti Corruption Foundation founder four years ago with a military grade nerve agent and have successfully murdered targets domestically in the past like politician Boris Nemtsov in 2015. Between his popular activism inside the country before he was medevac’d to a Berlin hospital and the videos he produced exposing Putin’s corruption and opulent dacha, Navalny was a massive threat to the regime’s domestic information monopoly. Even after the state imprisoned him on false charges after his brave return from Germany, he remained an anti-establishment symbol that dissatisfied Russians could rally around.
For this, he had to die. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has consolidated his position as an absolute monarch whose personal whims are national policy: L'État, c'est moi. One day he can order the full-fledged invasion of a neighboring democracy, the next he can instruct his state security agents to murder an imprisoned dissident. This is an insanely dangerous man who has total control of the largest country in the world and is obsessed with military conquest.
The man is at war with the very idea of “the West” and has made plain his desire to re-constitute the Soviet Union/Imperial Russia’s territory. If he succeeds in Ukraine, it will be because we collectively let him. As has always been his modus operandi, if Putin smells weakness he will press his perceived advantage. If he forces Kyiv to submit, he will move on to Moldova. If Chișinău falls, he will march into Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius. It doesn’t help that the leading candidate for the U.S. presidency this year is actively encouraging Moscow to invade our treaty allies in a bizarre mafioso-style shake down.
The possibility of sustained U.S. support for Ukraine is disgracefully currently up in the air. Absent the much needed artillery shells, fighter jets, and long range missiles that would allow Ukraine to reclaim its internationally recognized 1991 borders I find myself pondering a question that a senior Republican senate staffer posed to me last fall: what’s the theory of victory for Ukraine?
There’s one scenario that doesn’t get discussed openly very often but I guarantee you is being talked about in the Ukrainian SBU headquarters: Vladimir Putin’s personal liquidation. Putin is uniquely invested in this war and while his successor is surely not going to be some democracy-loving peacenik, he may be willing to come to a negotiated settlement with Kyiv and move on to the easier future of plundering Africa instead (see this week’s Running Thread on Mali for more on that). We know the Kremlin has tried multiple times to assassinate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy; I’m sure Kyiv views the dictator trying to erase their entire country off the map as fair game in return.
Genocidal dictators have a pretty long history of drawing the guns, blades, and bombs of the disgruntled. Adolf Hitler survived forty-two separate attempts on his life, perhaps most famously at the hands of his own military officers in his Wolf’s Lair on July 20, 1944. Hitler barely survived the explosion and would end up taking his own life a little less than year later. But I don’t anticipate Ukrainian tanks rolling into Moscow any time soon necessitating Putin to go full Berlin-bunker on us.
Logistically speaking it may be impossible for Ukraine to off the famously paranoid and reclusive Russian despot; you’ve probably seen the pictures of the comically large tables Putin sits at when taking meetings. Possibility aside, it’s not even clear such a move would bring the war to an end. It’s entirely plausible that a potential Putin successor would be happy to sacrifice another half a million Russians in service of defeating Ukraine. But before Putin blasted his private jet out of the sky for his betrayal, Wagner PMC head Yevgeny Prigozhin had a habit of complimenting Ukraine’s armed forces and President. Had he not gone gun-shy at the last minute last summer, Prigozhin may have been able to parlay sacking the Kremlin into bringing the war to a close under the guise of stopping Russian bloodshed in eastern Ukraine.
Realistically, Vladimir Putin will cling to life in the way only the worst historical figures find a way to—which underscores the dire need to defeat him in Ukraine. Astoundingly an American political party has managed to convince a large swath of our fellow citizens that winning the war against the new red menace for the low low cost of 0 American lives is not a good bargain. It’s infuriating that a former President is actively sabotaging an ally’s war effort via his grip on House Republicans.
I’ve held off writing about Russia so far in Son of a Diplomat as there is plenty of superb coverage across various Substacks and legacy outlets like The Atlantic (where you can frequently find Shield of the Republic host Eliot Cohen’s excellent pieces on the war). But I felt it would be newsletter malpractice to not discuss Navalny’s murder last week and the ongoing war he opposed. Russia has long claimed the mantle of ‘Third Rome’ by way of their eastern orthodox heritage after the fall of the Byzantines which is why I find it all the more ironic Roman Senator Cato the Elder’s refrain “Carthago delenda est” runs through my mind constantly these days with respect to Moscow.
Serbia/Kosovo
Tension is rising again in the Balkans as Kosovo has outlawed the Serbian dinar sparking international condemnation and mass protests:
Thousands of Kosovo Serbs in the ethnically divided town of Mitrovica rallied peacefully on Monday to protest against the decision of Kosovo's government to outlaw the Serbian dinar as legal tender. Serbia, which does not recognise the independence of Kosovo, its former southern province, uses the dinar in predominantly Serb areas to pay pensions, social assistance and wages for some parallel Serbian institutions such as hospitals and schools.
Two days ago Kosovo marked sixteen years of independence from Serbia—an independence that was unilaterally declared and never recognized by Serbia as noted in that quote from Reuters. The relationship has been rocky to put it mildly ever since; Interpol just issued arrest warrants for the Serbian gunmen who stormed a Kosovar monastery last September.
Serbia has also been militarizing in the recent months, buying anti-drone weapons systems from Moscow and considering bringing back conscription for the first time in thirteen years. None of this bodes well for the future of Balkan stability.
Venezuela/Guyana
Venezuela is continuing to eerily mirror the path that Russia set out on in 2021—amassing troops and military outposts on their border with a neighbor they have made clear they would like to invade while outwardly denying those troops are intended for an invasion:
Venezuela is expanding military bases near its border with Guyana and deploying forces to the jungle frontier as President Nicolás Maduro ramps up his threats to annex the country’s oil-rich neighbour, satellite images have revealed. Maduro pledged at mediation talks in December not to take military action against his neighbour but images shared by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington today suggest a buildup of forces.
Domestically Maduro is cracking down, ordering the ouster of UN human rights office staff from Caracas and arresting a security analyst and her whole family while outlandishly claiming she was part of a plot to kill the Venezuelan dictator.
Azerbaijan/Armenia
Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan is ringing the alarm that Baku is planning to move on Armenia proper now that they’ve re-established complete control over the formerly contested Nagorno-Karabakh region:
Azerbaijan may be planning a "full-scale war" against Armenia, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan claimed on Feb. 15, as tensions between the two countries remain high, AFP reported...Earlier this week, a border skirmish killed four Armenian soldiers, Yerevan said. Both sides have blamed one another for initiating the incident.
Bolstering these fears is the fact that Azerbaijan has deployed armed forces in the Syunik region since the end of the 2020 war. Armenia has been betrayed by Moscow’s security guarantees repeatedly this decade and should Baku decide to execute a full-scale invasion, Yerevan would be clearly outmanned and outgunned.
Mali
Cooperation between the west African junta-led states and the Kremlin is increasing with the AEI’s Critical Threats reporting that the Wagner forces that remain in Mali captured a gold mine two weeks ago:
The Wagner Group and Malian army took control of an artisanal gold mine in northeastern Mali, which will bolster the Kremlin’s sanctions evasion efforts. Wagner and Malian forces captured the Intahaka mine in Mali’s Gao region on February 9. The mine is the largest artisanal mine in northern Mali. Multiple armed groups—including the regional al Qaeda and Islamic State affiliates—have controlled and taxed the mine in recent years.
Putin filling his war chest via private military cut outs is precisely why I continue to write about the collapse of democracies in west Africa. As the military regimes in the region deepen ties with Russia, they’re also increasingly binding their countries together. To that end Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger’s juntas just announced a plan to confederate the three states:
The group has not shared details on how the proposed confederation would work or on how closely they plan to align political, economic and security interests as they struggle to contain a decade-old battle with Islamist insurgents that has destabilised the subregion. Last November, their finance ministers said they would weigh the option of setting up a monetary union and top officials from all three countries have, to varying degrees, voiced support for abandoning West Africa's CFA franc common currency.
Iran
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies has released an incredibly useful tool that maps out the location of Iran-sponsored attacks since the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack:
This visualization lays out the Biden administration’s infuriating lack of consequential action on Iran. This administration has been all about half-measures be it Russia or Iran which is why Tehran continues to ship weapons to the Houthis and instruct their Shia militants to launch explosive drones at military personnel and cargo ships.
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