Steve Gutterman's Week In Russia

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Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskiy have now both been at center stage in U.S. political controversies that have affected elections to the White House and the fate of its occupant. In terms of how they got there and how they have handled it, though, there are plenty of differences.

Like The Same Thing, Only Different

In some ways, it seems like a fool's game to place the presidents of Russia and Ukraine side-by-side for purposes of comparison and contrast. Their countries are vastly different in geographical size, geopolitical position, and more.

As for the men themselves, the most dramatic differences between Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskiy include age (66 and 41), background (KGB officer, funnyman), and time in office (20+ years as president or prime minister, 4+ months as president).

But now that both Putin and Zelenskiy have been in the center-stage spotlight in American political controversies that have colored U.S. presidential campaigns, it's hard to avoid making the comparison – or at least hard to resist it.

To recap what put each of them in the spotlight, if that's even possible: Putin was accused by U.S. intelligence agencies of ordering a multipronged "influence campaign" aimed at discrediting the American electoral process during the 2016 presidential race, undermining Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, and helping her Republican rival, Donald Trump, win the White House.

SEE ALSO:

U.S. Intelligence: Putin Ordered Hacking Campaign To Help Trump Win

Zelenskiy seems to have been thrust into a lead role more accidentally. The Democratic speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives has launched an official impeachment inquiry, the first step in a process that could potentially force Trump from office, largely as a result of a phone call the two presidents held on July 25.

In it, Trump prodded Zelenskiy to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination to face him in the 2020 presidential election, who pushed for the dismissal of Ukraine's chief prosecutor in 2016. Trump's conduct in the call has fueled accusations that he sought to enlist a foreign leader to dig up dirt on a political rival.

So, there's the difference: Zelenskiy is seen by Trump's accusers as having been beseeched or bullied to meddle in a U.S. election, while Putin is accused of setting the meddling in motion himself.

But the difference goes deeper, or wider, and includes the way that the two presidents have handled the attention.

'I Don't Want To Be Involved'

Zelenskiy is still just starting to deal with the matter, as the whistle-blower complaint that unleashed the scandal became known to the public less than two weeks ago, and the memo recounting his phone conversation with Trump was released by the White House on September 25 -- the same day the two presidents held talks on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.

So far, the Ukrainian president seems to be doing his best to cede the lead role and stay -- to the degree that it is possible -- in the shadows. Kyiv has not released a transcript of the call, and Zelenskiy has said the conversation was "normal."

His main tactic at this point appears to be a mix of diplomacy and defiance, stating that "nobody pushed" him in the call -- even after the memo showed that Trump mentioned the matter several times -- and suggesting that he, and Ukraine itself, are impervious to influence from abroad.

"Nobody can put pressure on me because I am the president of an independent state," Zelenskiy said shortly before the talks with Trump at the UN. He has also sought to inject humor into the matter, joking that the only person who is capable of putting pressure on him is his six-year-old son.

Speaking to reporters alongside Trump, the comic-cum-president delivered a one-liner about the brouhaha: "I'm sorry, but I don't want to be involved in the democratic elections of the U.S.A."

Was that a dig at Putin? If not, it could easily be mistaken for one – and it came on the day Zelenskiy, in his first-ever address to the annual UN General Assembly, tried to wrench the sudden sharp interest in Ukraine away from Washington and Trump and focus it on Moscow, Putin, and what he called "Russian aggression" in Ukraine.

"None of you will be able to feel safe as long as there is a war in Ukraine, a war in Europe," he said, a reference to the war between government forces and Russia-backed separatists who hold parts of two provinces in the region in eastern Ukraine known as the Donbas.

SEE ALSO:

'We Were Dragged Into This': What Ukrainians Think About The Trump Scandal

The conflict has killed more than 13,000 people since April 2014, when it erupted after Russia seized Crimea, further southwest, and fomented separatism following the ouster of Moscow-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych in Kyiv.

The war, of course, is part of the 'malign activity' that U.S. officials accuse Putin and Russia of pursuing around the globe in the past six years or so. And it seems likely to continue after the spotlight in the U.S. political standoff shifts away from Zelenskiy and Ukraine, regardless of the outcome for Trump and the 2020 election.

Another element in the "malign activity" is Russia's alleged effort to influence the 2016 election.

Pride And Pragmatism

Much as Zelenskiy has sought to steer clear of the spotlight amid the controversy centered on Trump, Biden, and Ukraine, Putin has sought – most of the time -- to play down Russia's interference in the election. Or, as with Russian involvement in the war in eastern Ukraine, simply deny it despite the evidence.

But the denials have never been quite complete. Instead, perhaps as the result of a combination of pragmatism and pride -- a need to hedge in the face of evidence and a failure to repress the instinct to take credit where one believes it is due -- blanket denials have given way to equivocation, admissions, or revelations that show a flash of the truth but seek to keep the rest under wraps.

It happened with Russia's occupation of Crimea: The "little green men" – soldiers in unmarked uniforms who popped up on the Ukrainian peninsula in 2014 -- were first cast by the Kremlin as a mystery, then said to be locals, and eventually acknowledged to have been Russian servicemen.

And a year after the takeover, a fawning film on Russian state TV depicted it as a smooth and successful operation with Putin at the controls. So much for deniability.

As for eastern Ukraine, where Kyiv and NATO say thousands of Russian troops have fought in a conflict fueled by weapons and other support from Moscow, Putin has poked holes in the Kremlin's own denials of involvement by the Russian military in what Moscow inaccurately refers to as a Ukrainian civil war.

At his annual press conference in 2014, Putin asserted that Russians fighting there were "doing their duty at the call of their hearts or voluntarily taking part" in the conflict. At the same event in 2015 he elaborated, sort of.

"We have never said that there are no people there involved in resolving certain issues, including those related to the military sphere. But this does not mean that there are regular Russian troops there," Putin said. "Feel the difference."

Seems a bit hard to feel, though, given the convoluted wording of a sentence in which he specified "regular troops" and did not even flatly deny that such troops were in Ukraine.

A similar shift from clear denial to something short of it occurred in the months after the U.S. intelligence community came out with its main accusation of Russian election meddling in January 2017, two months after Trump won the presidency.

Putin said in June 2017 that "patriotically minded" Russians could have been involved in the hacking attacks that U.S. intelligence agencies said were part of the "influence campaign" he ordered. But he added: "We're not doing this on the state level."

The distinction may be pretty small.

"The boundary between state and private action, however, is often blurry in Russia, particularly in matters relating to the projection of Russian influence abroad," a New York Times article on Putin's comments said. "This provides a measure of plausible deniability for actions that the Kremlin does not want to be linked to publicly."

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If you don't like the weather, wait 15 minutes. They say that about New England, but it might work for Moscow, too, if it's the short-term political climate you're talking about. One day, a man is sentenced to years in prison, a few days later he may be released from jail. But the next, some other crackdown is in the forecast. Tough to tell a thaw from a false spring these days.

Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.

Hot And Cold

A thaw is a palpable thing, particularly in Russia: When spring comes to Moscow, you feel it first in your blood and in your bones. Before you know it, you're facing the sort of high temperatures the folks back home don't quite believe can be reached in the colder of the two former Cold War foes.

But when it comes to political thaws, things are maybe not as clear cut in Moscow these days as they were as they were in the Soviet Union, where the Thaw that followed Josef Stalin's death lasted about a decade -- its start often seen as marked by successor Nikita Khrushchev's secret 1956 speech denouncing the cult of personality surrounding the late dictator.

What feels like a warm spell one day may be replaced the next by an icy blast.

A cartoon shared on social media titled: "It's not a thaw, it's a backswing.'

Over a six-day stretch in June, for example, journalist Ivan Golunov was detained, beaten, and confined to house arrest on a drug charge and then cleared and released, prompting celebrations by colleagues and other citizens who had taken to the streets -- and the front pages of several publications -- to call the case against him a blatant fabrication.

SEE ALSO:

Kremlin Climbdown On Golunov An 'Isolated' Success For Civil Society

But within less than 24 hours of the state's stunning reversal on Golunov, more than 500 people had been hauled away by police in Moscow. And by late July, the police and National Guard were cracking down hard on protesters demonstrating over the exclusion of several independent and opposition candidates from the ballot in the September 8 Moscow City Duma election.

More than 3,000 people were detained in Moscow during the wave of protests in the weeks before the vote, some of them beaten, and seven have been sentenced to prison terms ranging from two years to five years -- punishments that rights activists contend are highly disproportionate or entirely unjustified.

At least one of those seven seems unlikely to serve that term, though. On September 20, after a hail of outrage from fellow thespians and a host of others, the Moscow City Court ordered the release actor Pavel Ustinov from pretrial detention -- which means he will await the result of his appeal "in freedom," as the Russian term has it, and not in jail.

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Russian Blockbuster: Actors Lead Moscow Protest For Jailed Colleague

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It also means that while he may not be exonerated on appeal -- a step that would not sit well with the siloviki -- he can probably expect to have his sentence reduced or, perhaps more likely, suspended to allow him to avoid prison.

Suspending the sentence for a prominent defendant is a tactic the Russian state has used before when it apparently feared a backlash and decided not to create a martyr -- most notably in 2013 in the case of Aleksei Navalny, who has been jailed for days or weeks many times but has never been sent to prison.

'A Thief Must Be In Jail'

Putin, in power as president or prime minister for 20 years, has repeatedly cast himself as a tough but fair leader who backs a firm form of justice but -- a claim that is probably believed by few people, if any – does not interfere with the courts.

In 2000, in the rushed and lopsided presidential campaign that followed his appointment to the post on an acting basis by Boris Yeltsin, Putin promised to turn Russia into a "dictatorship of law."

A decade later, Putin tried to take the politics out of the prosecution of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky by quoting a famous hard-guy line from a Soviet film: "A thief must be in jail."

SEE ALSO:

Teflon Putin? Over 20 Years In Power, Scandals Don't Seem To Stick To The Russian President

But what about a journalist, or an actor?

The police climb down on Golunov came after a concerted show of support by fellow journalists, while actors and others from the world of Russian theater and film were at center stage in the dramatic defense of Ustinov. In both cases, prominent people close to these professions -- but firmly allied with or in fact working for the state -- have joined the ranks of those calling for justice and accused law enforcement agencies of "bending the stick too far," as the Russian term goes.

Russian journalist Andrei Arkhangelsky calls this phenomenon "workshop solidarity" and suggests that the professional groups and Putin's Kremlin have been testing each other this summer, trying to gauge the extent -- and the limits -- of their power over one another.

"Solidarity with 'your own people' -- colleagues at the theater, the hospital, the institute -- is the unspoken but on the whole encouraged societal norm," Arkhangelsky said in an article in the Russian news outlet Republic. "You're allowed to stand up for your own people, and it's still considered respectable."

"The long-term significance of the Ustinov campaign and others this summer, he argues, is that Russia's authorities are learning to negotiate with various 'workshops' -- journalists, students, and now actors," according to a summary of Arkhangelsky's article by the Russia-focused media outlet Meduza.

Many of those who urged the authorities to release Ustinov have also called for justice for others who have been convicted or face prosecution in what has come to be known as the Moscow Case -- an echo of the Bolotnaya Case that followed the crackdown on protests over evidence of electoral fraud and dismay at Putin's return to the presidency in 2012.

'More Than Just Malice'

If it's easy to see why the Russian authorities might be more inclined to step back from a prosecution or shorten a prison term in certain cases -- such as when there is a vocal and potentially influential community that includes Kremlin allies voicing anger -- it may be harder to see why these particular people faced prosecution in the first place.

But there may be a method to the madness, some rules in the absence of the rule of law.

While most of the people detained during the Moscow protests "were freed, fined, or given minimal sentences, the state's eagerness to visit its displeasure on a seemingly-random selection of critics is more than just malice, it is a strategy," Mark Galeotti, an author and expert on Russia and its security services, wrote in an opinion article in the Moscow Times.

Among other instruments to blunt the power of its opponents and the citizenry as a whole, the authorities "rely on deliberately capricious prosecutions," he wrote, adding that "from time to time individuals find themselves in the Kremlin's crosshairs for the slightest of reasons, and the outcome can be disastrous."

"The message is simple. If you want to protest, we may let you, but we might also beat you and arrest you, regardless of how you behave," Galeotti wrote. "In this way, the authorities hope to prevent protests from becoming normalized and limit them to a hardcore who are willing to take that risk."

On July 27 and August 3, police were beating people and arresting them in droves. Weeks later, they were letting them protest with little interference.

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No One Safe As Moscow Police Lash Out

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One factor in what may seem like a swift alternation between chill and thaw, or mini-chill and mini-thaw, is the tension among rival camps close to Putin -- which threatens to heat up as the end of his term in 2024, when he is barred from seeking reelection by the constitution -- inches closer.

"These struggles, rooted in a mix of factional interest and political disagreement, play out in what seem often contradictory policies. This was perhaps most visible during the Moscow protests before the local elections," Galeotti in a separate article published on the website Raam Op Rusland.

Bulldogs Under The Rug

Hard-liners like Federal Security Service (FSB) chief Aleksandr Bortnikov and Nikolai Patrushev, a close Putin ally who is secretary of his Security Council, seemed to set the ominous tone at first.

"And the result was over 2,000 arrests and viral videos of riot-armored 'cosmonauts' beating and arresting peaceful protesters," Galeotti wrote.

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A Primer On Moscow Protests

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But other factions were alarmed for several reasons -- some selfish, some less so -- and the final pre-election protest held without permission, on August 31, was free of police violence.

But that hardly amounts to a thaw -- especially if you consider that on September 10, two days after Navalny's "smart voting" strategy helped defeat several Kremlin-backed candidates in the elections and drastically reduce their majority in the Moscow legislature, police raided the offices and searched the homes of activists who back him in more than 40 cities and towns.

And a day before Ustinov was ordered released, a shaman who set out for Moscow on foot from Yakutia a few months ago in a quest to chase Putin from power was detained -- grabbed by masked officers in a predawn raid on his roadside camp in the Buryatia region near Lake Baikal.

The shaman, Aleksandr Gabyshev, said in July that God had told him Putin was a demon and "ordered me to drive him out."

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Shaman On 8,000-Kilometer Trek 'To Topple Putin'

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A day after he was seized, the shaman was sent to a psychiatric hospital in Yakutia, whose regional Health Ministry said he would be evaluated and provided with "quality medical care" if he is deemed mentally ill.

Back in Moscow, meanwhile, a new protest is expected on September 29 after a hiatus of several weeks.

The eventual effects of the protests are unclear. But in an article in Time magazine, journalist Leonid Ragozin suggested that the events of this summer have served to undermine whatever gains Putin made with his audience at home as a result of muscular moves abroad in recent years, such as the takeover of Crimea and a major military campaign in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

"All of that was supposed to showcase Russia's newly acquired assertiveness and vigor, to its own citizens more than anyone else," Ragozin wrote.

"It worked that way for some years. But today Putin is back to square one," he wrote, adding that he now faces "an entirely organic opposition which -- thanks to Putin's own draconian legislation on 'foreign agents' -- is reliant neither on Western funding nor endorsement."