The day before the fake “referendum” that handed Crimea to Vladimir Putin’s Russia in 2014, I marched against the annexation with tens of thousands of other Muscovites — but a majority of Russians supported the move, and Putin’s popularity, measured by independent sociologists, soared to highs not seen before or after. Now that the dictator has launched an all-out attack on Ukraine, there will be no large-scale protests and no popularity bump. Seven years later, Russia is a different country — one that allows Putin to disregard it.
That, however, is hardly sustainable.
At the time of the Crimea adventure, Russia still had an active political opposition. Former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov was still alive and protesting loudly against the takeover. Most of my friends saw the move as the end of Russia’s civilized European path, a major defeat for the freedom project launched by the fall of the Soviet Union. By 2022, the opposition has been crushed, chased into exile or underground. Nemtsov was assassinated in 2015. When Alexei Navalny speaks out against the war on Ukraine, he does so from a penal colony where he’s been locked up for a year and where he’s being tried on further trumped-up charges. And when one of Navalny’s trusted lieutenants, Leonid Volkov, curses Putin on Telegram and expresses the hope that the dictator has bitten off more than he can chew, he does so from relative safety in a European Union country.
