phoenix persönlich: Prof. Ulrich Schmid (Russland-Experte) zu Gast bei Michael Krons

The Russian president ordered partial mobilization and again warned that he could use nuclear weapons. He literally said it's not a hoax. Welcome, you are in the studio, Mr. Schmidt, we have a partial mobilization. a turning point Now there are new protests in Russia The unrest in Russia, although on a small scale, has reached a turning point at this moment Putin has his back to the wall and that is, so to speak, his message from anywhere . In other countries he is willing, so to speak, to bring the war to the center of society and he made it clear that he does not want to back down.

You and I are

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essors of Russian literature and society at St. Petersburg University. Gallen. We have been wondering since February 24 how the Russian population reacts. Why are we doing this? There are few rebellions that actually remain relatively quiet in Russia, or is it a mistaken impression that there were some protests just after February? 24 in many cities in Russia and there is a civil society organization that documents these protests and it is very good if you look at the chronology of how these protests are distributed, you can see that we have had 16,000 cases of these types of protests so far. and 15,000 of these 16,000 took place in the first month and of course it is not that the protest atmosphere has simply disappeared now, but the massive repression that began since the beginning of the war the Russians are aware of.

It is happening and has reached social consciousness. Yes, there has always been this number that is quoted that 80 percent of Russians support this special operation. You have to do it with a grain of salt because that's really what it is. Of course, there is no broad consensus in Russian society, as there was in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea, that this now means the future of Russia, this war is considered a necessary evil. accepted and now we will see what will happen to Russian society in the future, when not only the 10,000 deaths really reach people's consciousness, but now you know that a son died and you also find out that he was in Ukraine.

Of course, considering the circumstances and being aware of it, this is largely kept under wraps. Already at the beginning of the war, Putin also promised massive payments for the families of the victims, but officially the Ministry of Defense only admits that it was around 6,000. victims a fraction of what we really have to assume, we have around 300,000 reservists who are currently mobilizing right now, but that also means 300,000 who have a family in question, who have parents, who have grandparents, who maybe have children , but This does not mean that this war is also entering the consciousness of society with much more force in families and that is the case and I think that the military authorities know very well that the potential for protest is very high.

Now I have the first information. acquaintances in Russia where people from the surrounding area have received this order and it is obviously not applied very strictly, so if you point out that you have small children, then you will not be recruited immediately. These 300,000 are actually only a fraction of them. number of reservists available in Russia - we have asked ourselves again and again: How is this action by Putin, which has also closed down democracy as a whole, that is, democratic efforts in Russia, how has this awareness reached the people who feel that they live in a Russia that is no longer democratic and there are reactions to it that are noticeable in daily life or will this old saying come to light again because in Russia you can endure a lot, we must differentiate that the electric bicycle of Putin?

It is mainly in rural areas, where people only watch state television and at least since the big protests in the winter of 2011/2012, yes. This propaganda machine is very, very well oiled. I don't think there's much of that. There is an atmosphere of protest there. In the two capitals, Petersburg and Moscow, and in the other 12 million dollar places in Russia, there is very well-informed critical intelligence. How do they obtain the information? Twitter is blocked in Russia, but everyone who knows anything about them has a VPN and YouTube is not blocked yet and blocked channels like the BBC's Russian service Deutsche Welle or Radio free Europe post their images on YouTube and then there is opposition . channel is called Medusa and before each report it explicitly says, print what you see here and the same thing happens to your grandmothers and grandfathers so that they too can obtain critical and independent information, as we see in all countries similar structures that the media they instrumentalize relatively quickly and very specifically what is happening there in Russia has been prepared for a long time, yes, that is the case and it started relatively soon after Putin took office in 2000, long after the nuclear submarines went down Kursk, which was Putin's first PR disaster when he said in an interview when asked what had really happened and then he said that the ship sank and that was, of course, a slap in the face to the relatives and at that time Putin He quickly put all the television channels in order, which, by the way, even earned him a sentence from the Strasbourg Human Rights Court because he really took control of the n-tv channel with mafia methods.

They were always opposed to Putin and his region, but, for example, to the so-called pop icon of every pugacheva, who is very well known, who is very popular, who can now, so to speak, come out of the reserve and openly do something like that and what happens there. Duration All Pukatova is actually a big name in Russian show business. , but she and her husband left for Israel shortly after the war, which means that on the one hand she is not as exposed, but on the other hand, of course, her reach is still limited, although she has numerous followers in the social media, but I also think this is actually an important signal to the Russian public.

Pugachewa, for example, accepted an award from President Putin in December 2014 after the annexation of Crimea, but that means there is also a certain erosion that we are now also noticing in things. that take place in public and don't just happen behind the scenes because you have

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onal contacts in all the Eastern European countries and of course you also call them in Russia, Ukraine, you talk to them, how do they react? What do you get from them? They were told by university colleagues in Russia, who of course are surprised, and I am also surprised by how openly they express themselves on Facebook, of course, they limited this statement to their friends. but there are still many very, very brave voices in Russia, but that of course does not apply to the general public increases the general public this war until now has been something that happens very far away Putin also said that these are specialists who deal with this special military operation in a very

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essional manner is very far away and we can rely on it and in fact you can now get on with your life and Putin was completely surprised by the extent of the sanctions but there was a report from a radio journalist who asked to the people. in the Kremlin how do they feel now about this decision to go to war and immediately after February 24 he had surprised reactions, people said that we could not support it, he asked the same people again in May and then the answers were completely different, they said there was a kind of consolidation effect and the same people who were surprised in February said in May that the sanctions on the West are completely disproportionate and that if the West doesn't want to know anything about us then we don't want to know anything more about the West neither.

Was it a political statement or really

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onal? I think it was a personal statement because at this moment, of course, people's radius of action is that moving in and around the Kremlin they no longer have options. from home and that, of course, is a somewhat precarious guarantee of stability for Putin. Let's talk about this reason with Putin. There are philosophers that are mentioned, but ultimately it comes down to the fact that. what is taking place there finds justification for Putin only in history, but not in international law, so in reality he completely ignores international law and says that we have a historical claim, so what can be said with Certainty is ideology.

The determining factor in Putin's decision to go to war is not someone who conveys to his audience that he is violating international law. On the contrary, he always presented pseudo-legalistic justifications for the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the same was true in his unofficial declaration of war in February. On the 24th he explicitly said: I am ordering this special operation in accordance with Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Now, of course, we do not know outright what Article 51 is. a State to self-defense when attacked and Putin referred to this on February 24 in an absurd way. But these appointments do not show very clearly that the same applies to the application of international law as to the application of law in Russia itself, but rather that he selectively chooses something and then uses it to his advantage and that things are forgotten for complete, of course.

The main articles, that is, one and two of the UN, are stricter, in which even the threat and then, of course, the use The use of force is prohibited. Putty doesn't say anything about it, but it's actually the same as with the Ukraine assessment. He says that their own language is spoken there and there are also cultural traditions, but in reality they belong to this great Russian. empire, to the nation, that is a differentiation that cannot be understood. Yes, I think Putin, of course, has tried again and again in recent years to act as a historian.

I think many observers say that he only cares about maintaining his power. After almost a quarter of a century in power, he no longer interests her. He now wants to secure his place in the history books. Is the tsar's idea really behind it? Eclectic in his vision of history, he takes from Russian history everything that is useful to him in any way and one of his central creeds is the conversation about the millennial statehood of Russia. This goes back to the so-called Kia Varus, the. first East Slavic state structure also seen in 2016 Directly in front of the Kremlin a large statue was dedicated to Prince Kira Vladimir who lived in the 10th century and Putin actually derived the existence of the current state in Russia from the Kia Varus and this monument It is somewhat absurd because the Kia who was Prince Vladimir was never in Moscow, could never be in Moscow simply because Moscow did not exist in the 10th century.

They also know Russian literature very well. Intensive research carried out there in recent years. At least you can see the attitude in Russia. It is quite common among non-opponents about this huge empire, this special nation, this nation that also stands above the other nations, somehow you can understand it. how it came about, so of course there are always statements about Ukraine also among Russian opponents. For example, a staunch opponent of the Bolsheviks like Piotruwe, who fled after the October Revolution, was actually a representative of liberal ideas, but it was also clear to him that Ukraine had to be part of Russia.

The same applies to staunch opposition figures such as Alexander Social Need or Nobel Prize in Literature Josef Brotzki, both of whom openly said that Ukraine cannot be its own state and is part of it. How deeply ingrained is that in the Russian population? I would say that it is relatively present in the Great Russian population and perhaps it can also be remembered here that in the intellectual history of Ukraine itself in the 19th century there were several intellectuals. who described themselves as federalists, for example Michaela Gomanov, who is one of the most important protagonists of the Ukrainian national project.

In the 19th century, she did not demand a separate Ukrainian state, but she said that there had to be a Ukrainian federation and. Russia has done surveys in recent years and the surveys indicate that this feedback that we really belong to Russia is not very widespread in Ukraine, it is completely incomprehensible, it just has to be said that if Putin had read his surveys I probably would have read them, but I'm thinking about marching towards Ukraine again because the population is not so friendly to Russia. What did you find? We carried out a research project on regionalism in Ukraine and above all we wanted to test the prejudice that Russia and Ukraine are divided into two halves: a pro-European West and a Russian East and what we found is the following. : In 2013 and 2015 we did two surveys, just before the annexation of Crimea and just after the annexation of Crimea, and we found that there is also strong support for the Ukrainian state in the east, even if it is not based on its own language and Already the annexation of the cream has shown that Russia's aggression has also increased support for the Ukrainian national project in the East and, ultimately, I think that the building of the Ukrainian nation can be compared with the Italian one.

It started in Pimmel Mond and then spread throughout the peninsula, it spread through the boot further south and the same thing happens in Ukraine, the national project was prepared in Galicia, in the west, in western Ukraine and since then it has beenextended to the east, and you can say with certainty now it has reached the line of contact if you are with the Russians, the Ukrainians have argued in recent years, if you have studied the literature, if you have seen how Putin acts as a whole, who has increasingly centralized the State, so to speak. , in his person, did you still react with surprise to February 24 or did you have the feeling that it was actually a logical consequence?

No, I was completely surprised, I had not thought that Putin would attack for the simple reason of this disaster. what we have now was actually completely predictable, it was predictable that Russia would go into international isolation, it was predictable that the resistance in Ukraine would also be massive according to their polls, yes, and obviously Putin and his fears are a test of leadership. , but this historical Russia is supposed to be so strong that it can now be achieved. You have received comments like this in the last year, maybe in the last year, from your Russian contacts, we talked to you about it, it's for sure.

It is getting worse, yes, it is like that and many of my Russian acquaintances and colleagues have been outraged, on the one hand, there are some who have left their jobs, there are also those who are now abroad and benefit from these emergency scholarships . which were provided by many countries, but of course there are also many who accept the situation. For example, I recently met a colleague from an academic institute in Moscow who fled to Germany immediately after the outbreak of war and expressed himself very well. critically about their own children who stayed in Moscow, they have jobs there, they have families, they said we would spend the winter there and the father said that was actually unacceptable and then you can see again the division between the families, we have a very strange of oligarchs around Putin, strange because people in the West always thought they could be exploited to take away their privileges.

If in doubt, they were no longer allowed to travel to the West. They took money from them. Yachts were a symbol of this. There is Alisha Osmanov, who lived on Lake Tegernsee and allegedly evaded taxes worth 555 million euros. It must be extrapolated to total income, but that was not the case. working against Putin, that is the big difference between the oligarchs in Russia, on the one hand, and in Ukraine, on the other. Putin had started disciplining the oligarchs very, very early in the early 2000s and successfully carried out the keyword hottekowski, not who did it. I don't want to bow down and then disappear behind bars for ten years.

In Ukraine there are also oligarchs, but they are relatively powerful and that, paradoxically, led to a diversity in the media landscape because each oligarch in Ukraine had his own television channel and, Of course, they fought. each other on television channels While in Russia they actually only had the same state television, something else is coming from them or basically we should say that the attempt to instrumentalize the oligarchs has gone wrong. The oligarchs have made a timid. Of course, in this situation the oligarchs no longer have any influence over the Kremlin. You have to wonder who now has any influence over the Kremlin and Putin personally.

Putin is always very, very contemptuous in his historical-philosophical statements about the last starters of the Tsarist Empire and the Soviet Union, for him they are weak people who allowed a strong beginning to no longer have the dimension that it entails and I think that is what drives it at this moment, but what drives it is also its great danger in a book that we can really recommend from Europe between the fall of the wall and the war in Ukraine, you show these historical backgrounds. and the others who are authors there and the problem also comes into play for him that he is completely isolated: how long can that isolation be maintained without someone standing next to him and taking him out?

Is this supposed to be a partial mobilization? It is not Putin's own initiative, but the pressure from the hawks and the war party in the Kremlin has become so great that Putin is one of them. We have to make concessions to those who are fueling it, exactly to those who say that we should have gone to war a long time ago and I think Putin can now see for himself that he can no longer be part of the specifics of this state, simply because, on the one hand, he has become a toxic figure on the international stage and, on the other hand, because politically he can only remain in power through massive repression.

There was an extraordinary session of parliament in the summer and a new deputy prime minister, Denise Mantorow, a technocrat, was appointed. I figured there might now be something like a Gorbachev scenario for Putin. time, but that is the most positive scenario, it is an optimistic scenario that Putin will no longer run for president in 2024 and that a loyal technocrat will be put in the shield such as, for example, Denise Mantorow, responsible for the stabilization of the Russian economy and the so-called import substitution, but that is also an indirect consequence of the summary of Putin's reign because we have to say that now during the war he has completely isolated himself Especially from the toxic situation for him he also swore From the text a toxic figure, but ultimately you have to realize that Russia is ranked 11th among economic powers, that is a disastrous result and to this day Putin has not managed to really modernize this country and become a country that can do what really develops technology.

In addition to raw materials, yes, and that is a big problem. In the first ten years of his rule, Putin relied on gas and oil to continue adding new dollars to the state treasury. That worked relatively well for a relatively long time. time, but it didn't work. What worked was creating a framework for a flourishing economy and of course that is now completely destroyed. There is no longer legal certainty. In the foreseeable future there will be no foreign investments in Russia and. This, of course, is disastrous for the Russian economy. We have also seen that the balance sheet of the Russian state has now turned negative and Putin is really in economic trouble.

In the book, the corona pandemic shows the disproportion. the demands and reality of authoritarian government. This not only affects Russia but also other governments. The world is run in an authoritarian way and the nice final line is that the people of Russia are not yet lost to democracy, that's just how it is. old European cultural nation and I think what we are seeing now is a kind of North Korea scenario that can be taken into account, the Russian population will not last long, there will be protests, but of course democracy cannot be introduced there From overnight.

They are very, very important prerequisites and in my opinion the two most important are a functioning party system; we don't have, we only have pseudo-parties in Russia and we also don't have a functioning media system in Russia, we only have states. or state media, but the summary from you personally is a summary that still allows for a certain degree of optimism. Yes, I would say that Russia will not be able to free itself so quickly from being in this nationalistic and patriotic state. pass by simply because the elite team has worked exactly on this principle for the last 20 years.

Russia is not a meritocracy, but loyalty has triumphed over everything else and getting out of this impasse will be extremely difficult, there are very committed and morally impeccable people. like loboxobel, a politician from Moscow who is now abroad, who could return but at the moment the situation is so difficult that this is not a scenario for the near future. Professor, thank you very much for being with me. Thank you.