Results of the week. Realpolitik without realism

Russian leaders have spent the past week in a merciless fight against the Orange threat. The fighting took place both on the external and internal fronts. So far, the confrontation within the country is of a positional nature: the main battles lie ahead.

The authorities concentrated on organizing ambushes and carrying out all kinds of disinformation activities. So, tomorrow, on the day of the procession “For Fair Elections”, women from the house management will be driven to Poklonnaya to listen to Prokhanov and Kurginyan. The idea is as simple as three kopecks. On Saturday it will be necessary to balance out the TV pictures from Yakimanka and Bolotnaya with something. However, the difference between the two events is obvious. Those who walk through the center of Moscow will under no circumstances vote for Putin. And those who are forced to freeze for Putin at the “anti-Orange” rally may well choose another candidate.

It's the same story with TV channels. Just a few days later, it became clear what explains the attraction of unprecedented courage organized by the heads of federal television. The appearance of Ryzhkov, Nemtsov, and Kasparov on the screens was explained extremely simply. It was an extremely primitive attempt to regain some kind of trust. So that at least someone takes seriously the monstrous level of propaganda crafts glorifying Putin.

Moreover, all participants in the process insist with hard faces: this is not yet election campaigning. That is, when they tell us that Putin is the savior of the Fatherland, this is, damn it, independent objective journalism. Which again indicates the creation of some simulacra of propaganda. Yulia Latynina wrote very accurately: the point of such rallies is not at all to convince people to love Putin. The point is to convince Putin that he is loved. The point of the terrible TV hack is not to increase the number of people voting for Putin. The point is to convince the main voter, the prime minister, that TV bosses are simply working day and night to improve his image.

A wonderful article by Deputy Prime Minister (that is, state representative) Dmitry Rogozin appeared in Izvestia, dedicated to glorifying the approaches of V.V. Putin to the topic of the national question. The point is to convince like-minded people not to participate in opposition events. The text is remarkable in that a person in the civil service used the phrases “Russian by birth”, “drank Russian blood”, etc. And this is at the beginning of February. What will happen at the end of the month is simply scary to imagine.

The apotheosis of the scams was the meeting of candidate Putin (to comply with the law, Prime Minister Putin, they say, took a vacation for one day. Soon he will take a vacation for an hour, for twenty minutes - and the faithful Churov will immediately declare all this legal) with students of law institutes. The future prosecutors Lakhtins and judges Borovkovs, clearly on the recommendation of their senior comrades, decided to seize the initiative of the opposition and enroll one and all as Putin’s election observers. And Putin liked this idea extremely. Either purely according to Freud, or deliberately imitating a reservation, the prime minister confused the newly created “corps” of voters with the League of Voters.

The idea is also not very clever. In the same way, any cunning operator has at hand one or two pairs of witnesses, retired drunkards who served in the police. The Prime Minister not only cheered up the student observers, but also casually set up several ambushes for his competitors. For example, he promised to include oppositionists in the government. I must say that the wiring was a remarkable success. The headquarters of Putin’s competitors immediately began to discuss what kind of positions the national leader would bestow from his master’s shoulder.

But still, the main events developed abroad. Moscow heroically fought against “Orangeism” in the United Nations. The Russian representative heroically resisted the attempts of Western enemies to push through the Security Council resolution proposed by the League of Arab States on Syria. In order to convince Russia of the need to accept this resolution, the heads of foreign policy departments of leading Western states arrived in New York. However, their Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov ignored the possibility of personal contacts. Moreover, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton simply could not contact the head of our Foreign Ministry for the whole day.

Russia is fiercely opposed to the resolution, which demands that Assad, directly responsible for the deaths of at least five thousand of his compatriots, relinquish power. The same resolution proposes the introduction of sanctions against the current Syrian regime, primarily a ban on the supply of weapons. But Russia stood up as a wall for its friend Assad. The resolution, they say, opens a direct path to foreign intervention.

Over the past week I have been answering questions from foreign colleagues. They wondered what reasons made Moscow so unswervingly support the hereditary dictator. Is it really all about arms contracts?

Recently, a ship chartered by Rosoboronexport arrived in Syria, which, as foreign press reports, delivered 60 tons of ammunition to the regime security forces. Do Russian leaders really not understand that they are discrediting themselves in the eyes of the entire world community? Don’t they understand that if the opposition comes to power, all this will ruin relations with this country for a long time (if not forever)?

Of course, we can say that Syria is a long-time (since the 1970s) client of Moscow. The Assad regime provided Moscow with its only base in the Mediterranean (God only knows why it is needed, but that is another question). Finally, Russia has successfully sold its weapons to Syria for decades. A contract for the supply of 36 Yak-130 combat trainer aircraft worth half a billion dollars has just been signed. And before that, Moscow supplied ultra-modern Bastion missile systems to protect the coast, as well as fighter jets and anti-tank systems (by a strange coincidence, some of them ended up at the disposal of Hezbollah). In addition, contracts are being implemented to modernize armored vehicles delivered in the 1970-1980s.

I have written many times that Russian leaders in their foreign policy are guided by the Realpolitik of the 19th century (as interpreted by Yulian Semyonov and Valentin Pikul). In general, pure Palmerston: there are no eternal allies, but there are eternal interests. And then we got stuck - what the hell are our interests: we will defend Assad to the last! This is not geopolitics. This is different. The Kremlin bosses have real (not simulated, as in the case of missile defense) paranoia. They are absolutely seriously afraid of a “color revolution” and intend to fight the “orange infection” everywhere in the world. Even when it obviously contradicts one’s own interests. After all, if we had joined the resolution, you see, even after the change of power, the base would have been preserved, and even some contracts.

But instead, Russian leaders are literally fighting to the death. And this means that the desire to fight color revolutions has overcome all rational calculations. Putin's Realpolitik has finally lost its realism.