By Annie Domini
Vladimir Putin has been re-elected as the Russian Federation’s new old president, securing a record fifth term in office with a thundering 87.28 percent of the vote, supported by over 75 million voters, more than his win in the 2018 presidential polls. To a consistent observer of the Russian affairs, the news is hardly breaking, as the numbers tallied nicely with Putin’s approval ratings, at a whopping 87 percent. Putin’s opponents in the presidential race barely managed single digit support, including the Communist Party’s Nikolay Kharitonov at 4.31 percent, Vladislav Davankov of the New People party at3.85 percent and Leonid Slutsky of the Liberal Democrats at 3.20 percent respectively.
While the Western press is awash with the predictable balderdash accusing the elections were ‘unfair’, or ‘rigged’, any serious reading of the Russian geopolitical momentum would have balked at a different outcome. Putin is steering Russia most dexterously through its toughest time since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and he’s doing a bloody good job of it. Not only is Russia decisively winning an existential war that NATO has brought to its doorstep through the cannon-fodder in Ukraine, it is also beating an astronomical number of West-led sanctions, and still coming up on the top in Europe, finally embracing true economic sovereignty.
In other words, under Putin’s leadership, Russia instead of disintegrating under a multi-pronged attack egged on by the collective West, is stronger than ever in the post-Soviet times. It is decimating the military might of the combined NATO-supplied war effort in Ukraine, exposing the gaping chinks in the NATO military industrial complex. Its ties with Xi Jinping-led China are at their strongest, while relations with India, Iran and most of the Global South are formidable. To beat the Western sanctions, the most comprehensive ever, and despite the destruction of the Nordstream gas pipelines in September 2022 evidently by Western proxies, Russia has replaced the European buyers of cheap natural gas, wheat and other products with members of the Global South, making astronomical profits, which in turn has sustained the war effort. While the western companies were compelled to leave Russia because of the sanctions, domestic industries have been rejuvenated, since the flight of capital has been stopped, ironically by the West. The Russian replacement for the iconic American fastfood chain McDonalds, ‘Vkusno and Tochka’, is more popular than the original.
Russians are well aware of the innumerable provocations engineered by the US-led West and its ‘rules based order’ to destabilize their country, and that’s why for them the latest presidential elections were a were virtual no-brainer. The choice was simple: Putin equates stability in Russia, Putin equates Russia daring to stop the NATO juggernaut at the Russian border, also act as the bulwark against rampant Western meddling in the affairs of other countries in the Global South. Even the curious death of Western poster boy Alexei Navalny in prison serving a 30-year sentence just days before the presidential polls couldn’t muddle the Russians’ political clarity at these trying times. It’s Putin or bust.
Putin’s victory coincided with ten years of Crimea coming back into the Russian Federation in March 2014, months before it held the referendum to officially join Russia. It was a decisive moment in the contemporary history of Russia, with Sevastopol, the pride of port cities in the Black Sea, returning to the Russian fold. As the United States was instigating the Euromaidan coup in Kiev, capital of Ukraine, Putin-led Russia was ensuring the Crimean peninsula, with a population of 95 percent ethnic Russians and the hub of all Black Sea trade route, is secure.
The last decade has been decisive for Russia emerging out of its post-Soviet hesitancy in confronting the West. Putin has been in power for close to a quarter century now, overseeing the pulling together of and the transformation of the Russian Federation from the Yeltsin-era wreckage. The numbers are self-explanatory: compared to 1999 when he was appointed as the acting prime minister by President Boris Yeltsin, the GDP has grown 11.3 times, from a paltry 195.91 billion USD to 2,215 billion USD in 2023; the GDP per person has increased from USD 1,330.79 in 1999 to USD 14,403.57 in 2023, by almost 11 times. Inflation in 1999 when Putin was entrusted the reins of Russia was at an astounding 36.56 percent; now it’s at 3.51 percent, much less than that in most of the Western European countries. The gold-backed foreign exchange reserves were at a paltry USD 12.6 billion, while it’s now at over 600 billion USD, which the West has confiscated and trying to steal from Russia. The national debt in 1999 was at 92.1 percent of the GDP, while now it’s about 23 percent of the GDP, a healthy number, much lower than most developed countries in the West. Average monthly income in 1999 was a mere 1,500 roubles, while now it’s at 65,000 roubles, over 30 times more.
Putin has also made Russia self-sufficient in food and agriculture, banned GMO products, and is exporting wheat and other food items to the Global South, helping many others achieve food sovereignty. This is especially true for Africa where Russia has played a key role in supporting food needs, while China has been helping build world class infrastructure. In African Sahel, former French neocolonies like Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger have successfully ejected France and shaken hands with Putin-led Russia to fill in the gaps in military and governmental infrastructure. Russian flags can be seen everywhere in the former Francafrique, as a wave de-neocolonisation sweeps through much of Africa. Putin, along with China’s Xi, has helped form strong ties with Africa, bolstering relations and mutually beneficial commerce.
It’s obvious that Putin hasn’t won on empty promises but on his record performance, spear-heading the Russian transformation into a formidable world power once again. Along with China, Russia forms the fulcrum for the Global South to consolidate and find its own voice in the international negotiating table. Through BRICS and other platforms, Russia has consistently batted for multipolarity, saying the days of the Western exceptionalism is well and truly over. Both Putin, and his top ministers, including foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, among others, have stressed Western neocolonial extractivism will no longer be tolerated.
In the handful of interviews that Putin gave in the days before the polls, notably to the American journalist Tucker Carlson, he outlined Russia’s geostrategic red lines clearly, saying how NATO has inched closer and closer to the Russian border, bulking up in five waves of expansion, and is now threatening to include Ukraine with which Russia shares a very long, restive border. The special military operation that’s turned into a two-year-long protracted war has been about Russia finally putting its foot down and saying no more to NATO’s endless provocations and years of brutalities in the Donbass region against ethnic Russians.
The interview was watched by hundreds of millions of people, both Russians and others, even Americans, who saw in Putin a statesman in command of both his country’s history, as well as political geography and economics, a man determined to steer his nation through the turbulent waters of the times, the able captain of a very large ship navigating towards relative prosperity amidst tremendous challenges. Putin is the man many Americans wished was at the helm in their country too, instead of the octogenarian genocide apologist they are saddled with. (IPA)
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