There are no signs that the Russian elites will challenge Putin

Aleksandr Y. Lebedev appears to be a prime target for sanctions aimed at inciting Russian elites to turn against the Kremlin.

He is a former billionaire and former KGB agent with deep ties to both the Russian ruling class and the West.

His son owns British newspapers and is a member of the House of Lords.

But Lebedev has a message for anyone who expects him to try to overthrow the president now. Vladimir V. Putin:

“That will not work”.

In that matter, he insists, he is powerless. “What, should I go to the Kremlin with a banner now?”

Lebedev said it on a video call from Moscow. “It’s more likely the other way around.”

Leading Russian businessmen and intellectuals fled their country after the February 24 invasion, settling in places like Dubai, Istanbul and Berlin.

But many others who were well connected at home and had close ties to the West have been left behind, struggling to redefine their lives.

As they did, their paths parted, illuminating the turning point in the choices the war represents for wealthy and influential Russians, and the high odds of a broad coalition of Russians emerging to challenge Putin.

A handful speak out against the war while in the country, despite the great personal risk.

Many, like Lebedev, keep their heads down.

And some have chosen joint in the Kremlin.

“What we have is what we have,” said Dmitri Trenin, who until April led the leading US-funded think tank, the Carnegie Moscow Center, which the West relies on for independent policy and action assessments. .

Now he has completely changed roles, defining the West as “the enemy“and describing” strategic success in Ukraine “as Russia’s” most important task “.

“We have all exceeded the limit of a comparison in which dialogue has been possible for a war in which in principle there can be no dialogue for now, ”he said in an interview.

The mood of the so-called Russian elite, a kaleidoscope of senior officials, business executives, journalists and intellectuals, was closely watched for any internal reaction to Putin’s decision to go to war.

If yours consternation If the country’s sudden economic and cultural isolation crosses a threshold, some Western officials believe, Putin could be forced to change course.

However, what is actually happening, as the interviews show, is that the mood spans a spectrum despair to euphoriabut with a common denominator:

the feeling that the future of the country is out of their hands.

“They are drinking,” said Yevgenia M. Albats, a reporter still in Moscow, trying to characterize those elites who have been dismayed by the decision to go to war.

“They drink a lot.”

Hardly any Russian billionaire has come out strongly against the war, even as sanctions have frozen billions of dollars in their Western assets.

A prominent Putin aide resigned, presumably over the war, but did not comment on his departure; just a Russian diplomat, a mid-level official in Geneva, publicly discharged in protest.

Instead, many choose to cut ties with Europe and the United States and refrain from criticizing the Kremlin.

This position is in line with Putin’s continuing claims that it is better to interpret Russia than the West.

“It’s safer at home,” Putin said at an economic conference in St. Petersburg last week, demanding that wealthy Russians stay away from Western vacation homes and boarding schools.

“True, solid success and a sense of dignity and self-respect come only when you tie your future and your children’s future to your homeland“.

As a result, the tightly controlled policy of pre-war Russia now also appears vibrant in retrospect.

Albats, a liberal radio host and editor of a magazine, continues to stream from her apartment on YouTube.

The Echo of Moscow radio station, which has been broadcasting its program for nearly two decades, was closed after the war began.

He called Putin war criminal and already faces four counts of misdemeanor under the new Russian censorship law.

“This youthful energy of endurance – everyone who could have resisted is gone,” said Albats, 63.

“I have to resist, otherwise I will stop respecting myself. But I understand that life is over “.

However, for others, life goes on.

Lebedev, the business magnate, owns a minority stake Novaya Gazetathe independent newspaper whose publisher Dmitri A. Muratov auctioned its 2021 Nobel Peace Prize medal for $ 103.5 million this week to support Ukrainian refugee children.

Lebedev, 62, said Russia is moving closer to the “Iran and North Korea” model and could support it for years.

Putin would remain in power as long as his health permits, he predicted in a telephone interview, dismissing rumors that the president is ill as “nonsense”.

He insisted it wasan absolute illusionThat rich Russians may have some influence in Putin’s island circle.

He criticized the sanctions, saying they were just inciting rich Russians to join Putin by forcing them to cut ties with the West and making them feel victims.

Canada has included Lebedev on a list of sanctions by oligarchs that “directly allowed Vladimir Putin’s senseless war in Ukraine”.

He rejects this characterization and points out that he was one of the main financial sponsors of the independent newspaper best known from Russia.

Novaya suspended publication in March and Muratov announced it would do so to ensure the safety of its journalists.

Lebedev predicted that Novaya would not reopen as long as the war in Ukraine continued, which, according to military analysts, could lead years.

“I live here, I have to feed my family, so I will continue to do things in the fields that I understand something about,” he said.

“But it won’t be journalism.”

Life in Moscow has changed little so far, Lebedev said, even though it was proving difficult to import his collection of fine wines from Italy.

He noted that aside from Oleg Tinkov, the founder of a Russian bank who claimed he was forced to sell his stake this spring, no major Russian business magnate has come out strongly against the war, despite the many billions it could to possess. .

“Even if you say this was a mistake,” Lebedev said of the invasion, “we still have what we have.”

This is also the logic that helped Trenin, former director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, to change course.

For decades, he has given the leading foreign policy speech in both Moscow and Washington, employing Putin’s critics in his think tank.

Before the war, Trenin said it was unlikely that Putin would invade Ukraine as this would result in “huge human and financial losses” and “a tremendous risk for Russia itself.

But after the war began on February 24, when some of his colleagues fled, Trenin decided to stay.

He said it no longer mattered if invasion was the right decision in hindsight and that he now needed to support his country in what he presented as a war between Russia and the West.

The Russians who left and spoke out against the invasion, he said in a telephone interview, made the decision to “oppose their country, their people, in times of war.”

“This is the time to make a fundamental decision,” said Trenin, who served for two decades in the Soviet and Russian militaries.

“Either you stay with your people and in your country, or you leave.”

The Russian government closed in April andThe Carnegie Center of Moscow, funded by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace of Washington.

Trenin, 66, said he now intends to do research and teach in Moscow and that his previous mission to promote understanding between Moscow and Washington it is no longer relevant.

If Washington had agreed to Putin’s demands to promise Ukraine would never join NATO, Trenin argues, the war could have been averted.

Now, the conflict between Russia and the West “will probably continue for the rest of my life”.

“My work was aimed at creating mutual understanding between the United States and Russia,” he says.

“This didn’t happen.”

Jennifer Schuessler contributed to this report.