The authoritarian moment

Ian Bond, director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform, says Putin can afford to ignore these distant protests.

“Putin cares about what happens in Moscow and St Petersburg… everywhere else you can deal with it through a combination of bribery and coercion,” he said. “When things start bubbling in Moscow and St Petersburg, they are ruthlessly suppressed… I don’t think demonstrations by soldiers’ mothers in the periphery make much difference.”

“I suspect there is still an effort to make sure the kids of Moscow and St Petersburg, if they are mobilised, are not thrown into the meat grinder in the way that if you are a member of an ethnic minority from Siberia, you will be.”

...“The system itself – the elite itself – wants to keep Putin or a Putin-like figure in control, because they are worried that after him the next person may not choose to divide the spoils in the same way, “ said Bond. “We talk about the ‘vertical of power’ in Russia, but that’s over-simplifying. What you have is a number of verticals of power which converge on Putin, but do not connect horizontally and that means that they are all looking nervously at each other thinking, ‘when Putin goes, which of you is going to get to the top, and if you are not from my bit of the vertical are you going to reward the people in your vertical at my expense?’”