Regime change in Russia
The statement by Vladimir Putin that the government of Russia is something for the people of Russia to decide is one that has been echoed by some Western leaders and politicians. It is a pious sentiment but, unfortunately, it is not true. The Russian people have no opportunity to change their government because Russia is not a democracy in any meaningful sense of the word.
The Russian media is not free, and opposition and dissent are stifled. One opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov, was murdered in 2015, almost certainly by the FSB, successor to the KGB that Putin once worked for, and was done on his orders. The use of a Novichok nerve agent to poison another opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, is known to have been carried out by the FSB, again on Putin’s orders, and the name of the agent who carried it out is known.
A leading Kremlin critic, Alexander Litvinenko, was murdered in London with radioactive polonium-210, and again, the names of the two FSB agents who carried out the attack are known. The attempted murder of Sergei and Yulia Skripal was carried out on British soil by two known and named FSB agents using Novichok supplied on Kremlin orders and almost certainly sanctioned by Putin personally.
Street protesters are routinely and regularly beaten by police truncheons, arrested and imprisoned. The media toes only the Kremlin line, and opposition newspapers and TV and radio stations are silenced and shut down.
Elections are rigged, and ballot boxes are stored without scrutiny in the custody of government officials, or disappear altogether. The courts routinely hand down whatever verdicts and sentences the Kremlin seeks to impose.
This means that all the elements that go to make up a democracy are absent. No free press and media, no independent judiciary, no effective opposition tolerated, and no fair elections. The Russian people have no say in how their government behaves, and cannot change it. It is a mockery to say it is “in their hands.” It is not.
The behaviour of Russia’s brutal regime underlines the merits of democratic accountability in the free countries of the world, the ones that can peacefully change their government and influence their government’s course of action. It makes us appreciate what we have when we see what happens in countries which lack that.
When regime change comes about in Russia, it will not come from the Russian people, but probably from men in military uniforms, or more likely from the black-robed figure bearing a scythe.