Vladimir Putin’s edict announcing the call-up of thousands of reservists for his so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine appears to have caused widespread panic and protests among the Russian public. It seems that, for some at least, this executive order has finally brought home not just the gravity but also the proximity of the war that their president has visited on their neighbour.
Even some of the president’s most ardent supporters, while apparently accepting the edict’s formal validity, appear to be questioning its legitimacy in practice.
When Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, came to power in 1991 following the collapse of the USSR, he was faced with huge constitutional problems. In the transition from a Soviet economy to a market economy, legal vacuums appeared everywhere – the law on private property being one of the bigger ones. A fight for control over the direction of travel also ensued.
