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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Guardian.
Chapter 2: Is Putin losing his grip on power?
Today, is Putin losing his grip on power?
Last month, the Kremlin released this curious video of Vladimir Putin dressed casually in jeans and a jacket, walking with a bouquet of flowers in a hotel to meet his high school teacher. Pyotr Sauer is The Guardian's Russian affairs reporter. Decoding Kremlin propaganda is very much part of the job description.
On his way to meeting his teacher, he also made chitchat with a random passerby, who later turned out to be someone who worked for the Russian security services. The video showed the Russian president driving himself to meet Vera Gurevich. She taught the young Putin at school number 193 in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg.
She seemed delighted to see him, planting kisses on his waxy cheeks before he whisked her off for dinner at the Kremlin. So we as journalists often don't know where Putin is at any moment of the time. He is extremely careful about revealing his location.
Chapter 3: What does Putin's recent public appearance signify?
We know that he has a number of offices that look identical to each other, which is meant to hide his location. Sometimes he says he's in the Kremlin, but in reality he's sort of in an office that resembles his Kremlin office, but somewhere else. And all of this is meant to prevent any possible attacks that he fears.
As his war in Ukraine enters its fifth bloody year, Putin is seen increasingly rarely in public. What he thought would be a quick and easy conflict has proved anything but, costing the lives of half a million Russians and hitting the Russian economy hard. That's why this public appearance was so noteworthy.
The whole image was striking because it came amid growing reports that the Russian leader is isolated, that he's paranoid, and that he might even be fearing a coup.
By releasing this image, I think the Kremlin really tried to fight those reports, and they tried to portray the Putin that many Russians have come to know over the last 26 years, a man who's comfortable with the public, who considers himself one of the people. but do the Russian people still see him that way? From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pidd. Today in Focus, cracks in the Kremlin.
Piotr Sauer, welcome back to Today in Focus. Great to see you. Great to be here. So you're actually talking to us today from Armenia, and we'll talk a little bit about why you're there later on. But you're our Russia Affairs correspondent. You grew up in Moscow and you lived in Russia until Putin decided to launch his full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
And I know that you're still in very close contact with a lot of people in Russia. How are they feeling about their lives these days? So for the last few weeks, I've been gathering as much information as possible for several stories I wrote for The Guardian about the mood in Moscow and in Russia. And the picture I got was a country that is growing more and more tired of the war.
It has now entered its fifth year, both of the general population and as well as the elites. I don't know how reliable polling is in Russia, but has much research been done to try and take the temperature of the population? Yeah, of course, polling in a deeply authoritarian country should be taken with a grain of salt.
But we've seen from a number of indicators that from the beginning of this year, really, Putin's ratings have fallen. His approval has fallen.
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Chapter 4: How are ordinary Russians feeling about the war in Ukraine?
One poll showed that more and more Russians could imagine themselves joining a political protest. Another poll showed the happiness index is lowest in 14 years. But I think polling is just one indicator that we as journalists use to measure the atmosphere in Moscow. And the others are the interviews, but also some of the outrage we've seen on social media.
And how much of this outrage do you think is about the death toll in Ukraine? Last week, the head of GCHQ, a UK intelligence agency, said that 500,000 Russian soldiers had been killed since the conflict began in 2022.
As we remain steadfast in our support for Ukraine, Putin is going backwards on the battlefield. With new intelligence... showing that almost half a million Russian soldiers have been killed since the conflict began.
How widely known is that in Russia itself? Yeah, these figures are astonishing, really. More Russians have died in this war than any other wars combined, except the Second World War. Given these numbers, it's impossible for Russians to ignore this.
Chapter 5: What do recent polling results indicate about Putin's popularity?
But from the very start of the war, Russia has mobilized and recruited soldiers as much as possible away from Moscow and away from St. Petersburg, so in the countryside, the poor areas. I did a story on a village far away in the north of Russia, northeast of Russia, where 30% of all male population went to fight and many died. So in a village like that, obviously the war is felt very hard. Yeah.
And so when they hear Putin claiming that the war is going brilliantly, they have evidence to the contrary in terms of their sons who've not returned home. Yeah, well, we've seen that at the start of the war that I think because Russia thought that, you know, this would be a quick war, you know, they were prepared for sacrifices.
And a lot of these men who died were glorified in state press and media. And Russia made sure to take care of the families of the fallen. So they've given wives and children of men who died enormous amounts of money. You know, these are figures that some of these men and their families have never seen before. So that helped to prevent some of the anger.
But now, you know, it's going into fifth year and Russia is struggling to recruit soldiers as much as they did in the beginning of the war. You know, we know that around 30,000 soldiers per month are killed or injured. And until now, Russia was able to recruit as many each month. But now we're seeing a turning point.
Are we seeing now more Russians feeling emboldened to actually talk out publicly, or are they just giving anonymous comments to pollsters when they ring up? Obviously, if you're an average Russian, you're not going to write on social media that you're against the war. And if you do, you'll be in jail the next day.
But we've seen a shift among some celebrities, for example, on social media, there was this beauty blogger who's hugely popular with millions of followers called Victoria Bonya.
She was a reality TV star and she wrote this post in April.
She said that the Russian president has lost touch with his population. She addressed Putin saying, you know, Russians are scared of you. And then she listed the list of grievances she had with what is going on in the country. And is she in a gulag now? No, she actually lives in Monaco.
But I think even if she was in Russia, I don't think the Russian authorities would go after her because she's a massive personality. I think going after her would reveal some sort of panic in the Kremlin. Instead, the Kremlin has tried to coerce her. But we've seen other instances. There's this huge pro-war community online on Telegram, which is the Russian Facebook slash WhatsApp slash Twitter.
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Chapter 6: How is the Russian economy being affected by the war?
started to circulate about Putin. This nickname has already been around for a while, but it's now sort of growing in popularity, which is Diat of Bunkere, which means the grandfather in a bunker. And it reflects both, obviously, Putin's time spent in bunkers away from the people, but also the fact that he's old. You know, Putin is 73, he has ruled this country for 26 years.
And this nickname has specifically grown bigger because of Putin's new initiative to block the internet as much as possible. Putin himself famously doesn't use the Internet. He doesn't have social media, unlike Trump or any Western official, really. He doesn't use a mobile phone. So he doesn't really understand what the Internet means for millions of Russians.
And a massive part of the recent outrage is the blocking of the Internet, which started at the start of the war but has intensified in recent months. And what's the sort of official justification for blocking the internet? So to give you some context, Russia, shortly after the full-scale invasion of 2022, Russia already blocked many of the popular Western apps like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook.
But Russians could live with it because they used VPNs to circumvent the blocking. And they used their alternatives like Telegram and VKontakte. But in recent months, Russia started blocking Telegram, which every Russian I know uses for daily communication. And more recently, we've seen the government completely blocking the Internet.
So if you're someone in Moscow, you wouldn't be able to order a taxi, order food, pay for services. And that led to complete... shutdowns of these mega cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg, where 2 million people work as food delivery guys, taxi drivers. And the official reasoning behind this is that Russia says that it helps prevent Ukrainian drone attacks.
Experts and critics don't really buy it. Ukraine has been able to continue their drone attacks. You know, another reason is that the Russian security services, they fear Ukrainian partisan attacks on Russian generals, on high officials. And many of these attacks are coordinated via Telegram, where Ukraine finds local collaborators on Telegram.
On Tuesday, a senior Russian commander was blown up inside his car outside Moscow. in what appears to be the latest of this string of assassinations against high Russian targets. So that could be another reason. And I think the final reason is just that Russia wants to have control over the Internet and wants to be able to shut it down whenever it wants to.
And how are Russians reacting to this siege, really, and not being able to get online? That has been the number one trigger this year for this anger that we've seen.
I can't access my messages. Phones aren't loading.
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Chapter 7: What role do Russian business elites play in Putin's regime?
Authorities want to tie everyone to the national messenger, Max, which few people want to download and use. In the morning, a man got lost here. He was terrified. We showed him the way. We're all feeling anxious these days.
Russians have been forced to buy paper maps. Oh, wow. Some Russians have bought walkie-talkies. So Russia is back to the 90s.
Chapter 8: Is there a possibility of a coup against Putin?
Since the start of the war, Vladimir Putin made this sort of unspoken social contract with the Russian population that I'll be waging this war and I'll mostly leave the big cities. out of it. You know, as an average Russian, you will be able to live the way you're used to. Maybe you won't be able to buy the Western brands that you're used to, but otherwise your life will still be comfortable.
But now that social contract appears to be broken and that has frustrated a lot of people. And let's talk a bit about Victory Day, a big day in the Russian calendar, which was celebrated last month, which marked the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. How did that play out? Because it was a little different this year, wasn't it?
Victory Day is arguably the biggest holiday in Russia. Growing up as a kid, it was something that everyone looked forward to. And Vladimir Putin only made it bigger. And he introduced these mass military parades. Initially, Victory Day was a lot about remembrance, you know, remembrance of all the sacrifices to defeat the Nazis.
But for Putin, it also became an instrument to show Russia's might and for him to project the power that he has. We've seen these mass military parades happening every year, and they continued even after the Russian full-scale invasion. But this year, for the first time, Russia was forced to scale back the military parade. So there were no tanks. There were only a few jets flying around.
But it was a huge embarrassment for Putin.
They are worried their big day could be disrupted. So as a result, they've decided to scale back this year's parade.
I think many realize that this is hugely embarrassing, especially because, you know, when Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion, he saw that within a month or two, they would, you know, be inside Kiev. And now, you know, we have a world where Russia actually has to scale down its own parade inside Moscow.
Yeah, because it's so frightened of Ukrainian drones, which did manage to hit Moscow last month, right, in a pretty shocking incident for Moscow residents. Yeah, we've seen more and more drone attacks. We've seen drone attacks last week in St. Petersburg during Putin's famous SPIF, which is the Economic Forum, also dubbed the Russian Davos.
Russia says its air defences have been responding to a Ukrainian drone attack on the area around St. Petersburg.
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