Russia’s breaking point: Putin pushes restive regions to the brink

Politico ^ | 20 October 2022 | Jamie Dettmer

[Cronos]

“Why are you taking our children? Who attacked who? Isn’t it Russia that attacked Ukraine?” The questions hurled at the police by a clamorous group of indignant women outside a theater in Dagestan’s capital

That was last month the confrontation between infuriated mothers in Dagestan, a mountainous republic within the multi-national Russian Federation, took place shortly after Putin announced a partial mobilization. Elsewhere in the north Caucasian city, standoffs between protesters and baton-wielding police were fiercer with jostling and heavy-handed arrests, according to geo-located posted videos.

Some other ethnic minority parts of the Russian Federation, including its 22 ethnic republics, as well as other far-flung territories, or krais, even majority ethnic Russian ones, have seen anti-mobilization protests in recent weeks — as far afield as the Siberian city of Yakutsk, the capital of the Sakha Republic and Vladivostok in Russia’s far east. ...

How long will people in Russia’s ethnic republics and far-flung territories remain quiet and subdued? Not for much longer

The republics have long chafed under Moscow’s imperial rule — so too territories in the far east and parts of remote northern Russia. The seeds of potential rebellion, especially in the North Caucasus, the Sakha Republic and the Middle Volga, are being sown, he thinks. Increasing economic distress and impoverishment, the exploitation of natural resources only for the benefit of Moscow, the failure to drive development and investment, a reckless attitude to pollution and environmental degradation, and governance swinging from repression to negligence are all stoking simmering grievance.

...In 1990, fourteen of the 22 republics of the Russian Federation declared themselves sovereign and when a Federation Treaty was being negotiated the heads of several republics, including Tatarstan, demanded the new post-Communist Russian constitution recognize their “state sovereignty” as well as a right to secede from the Russian Federation

[Rockingham]

As an autocrat, Putin's interests, and those of the ruling elite that support him, inherently amount to little more than money and power for themselves and their families. That puts them at odds with the interests of Russia and its people in peace, security, prosperity, and the rule of law in a well-ordered society.