“For God’s sake,” US President Joe Biden said last month, “this man cannot remain in power,” referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose war of aggression in Ukraine has rocked the global economy.
While the White House immediately clarified that Biden was expressing moral outrage, not calling for a regime change, the possibility of a Kremlin coup d’etat has received much attention, especially as the country’s military has racked up huge losses of personnel and equipment.
Weeks before Biden’s declaration, US Senator Lindsey Graham called for a Russian Brutus to “take out” Putin’s Julius Caesar, and some observers believe that Russia’s military officers or security services might do just that.
Politicians and government officials, among whom discontent is reportedly growing, might support such a move, as might a broader defection of Putin-allied elites.
However, that is probably wishful thinking. Military coups depend largely on two factors: officers’ predisposition for overthrowing the government and the preventive measures taken by the regime. In Putin’s meticulously constructed Fortress Russia, the former is in short supply and the latter are abundant.
Outside Africa and Southeast Asia, successful military coups are increasingly rare. For example, of the 55 coup attempts that took place in the Arab world between 1949 and 1980, only half succeeded. Since then, just 17 attempts succeeded.
This reflects neither progress on democratization nor growing respect for civilian rule. Rather, it is a result of measures by leaders to “coup-proof” their regimes by, say, obsessively monitoring troops and empowering rival security agencies.
In Egypt, any military unit with more than 30 troops has a security-services detail, and the phones of soldiers and their families may be tapped.
Moreover, to prevent the emergence of cliques, regimes routinely stoke tensions among senior officers and hinder cross-corps communication. During the 2003 US invasion, Iraqi field units were prevented from sharing information with one another directly; instead, reports were transmitted to headquarters before being rerouted to the front.
Putin has long employed such tactics in Russia. In some cases, this has meant simply upholding Soviet practices, such as embedding ideological cadres known as commissars within military units to scrutinize troops and identify potential “traitors.”
Today, it is the Russian Federal Security Service — the successor to the KGB, of which Putin himself is a product — that fills this role. A praetorian guard loyal to Putin rather than to the state protects the Kremlin, while elite divisions stationed outside Moscow are complemented by myriad security units.
Putin also gives intelligence organizations overlapping mandates, so that they can act as checks on one another. In 2016, he installed a loyalist in the newly created Russian National Guard to quell internal dissent.
While the US president receives a morning intelligence assessment detailing world events, Putin receives a daily analysis of the elites’ machinations. Such steps drastically limit officers’ ability to discuss the possibility of a coup, let alone stage one.
Despite these efforts, certain conditions — such as domestic strife, economic crisis and foreign pressures — might increase military officers’ motivation to defy the regime.
Yet even then, a coup attempt is far from guaranteed. While sociopolitical turmoil has spurred military coups in Nigeria and Turkey, Colombia’s military refrained under comparable conditions.
Similarly, whereas a prolonged economic downturn pushed Ghana’s military to act, such circumstances induced forbearance by Ivory Coast’s military.
However, it is foreign pressures, such as the suspension of aid or imposition of sanctions, that seem to be the least likely to induce a coup: They have failed in a broad range of countries, from Iraq to Peru.
Militaries might be more likely to react to decisions affecting their corporate interests. For example, budget reductions or curbs on the military’s autonomy can inspire a response, although Russian officers remained in the barracks in the 1990s, when the Kremlin slashed the military’s budget and size. Disastrous foreign escapades can also spur militaries to act.
Factionalism within the officer corps is another potential trigger. In Turkey, tensions between generals and junior officers drove the latter to seize power. The same might occur in Russia, if younger field officers upset by the armed forces’ abysmal performance in Ukraine revolt against the top brass.
Even without such a revolt, sinking military morale can motivate officials to act. NATO estimates that 7,000 to 15,000 Russian soldiers died in Ukraine in the first month of fighting.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said that up to 20,000 Russian troops have been killed, including eight generals.
For comparison, Russia lost about 15,000 troops over a decade in Afghanistan, and the US lost fewer than a dozen generals during the eight years of its official military engagement in Vietnam.
Such high death tolls are likely to stoke fear and doubt among Russian troops in Ukraine, with reports of surrender, desertion and sabotage suggesting exceptionally low morale. The desire to end the carnage and restore esprit de corps might induce military officials to consider challenging Putin’s regime.
However, these potential motives for a coup remain speculative. Since 1905, Russia’s military has remained broadly apolitical. When Soviet secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria was removed in 1953 and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was ousted in 1964, the military merely implemented political leaders’ plans during intra-elite feuds.
Likewise, when Communist Party hardliners unsuccessfully tried to topple then-Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, virtually all senior military officers remained on the sidelines.
Russia’s military leaders seem committed to the idea of civilian supremacy, rather than believing that they must act as the state’s guardians, as their counterparts in countries like Egypt and Pakistan do. This has rendered the Russian military a passive political player.
Russia’s withdrawal from northern Ukraine is likely to increase elite frustration and decrease civilian morale.
Yet a military coup in Russia remains as implausible as the idea, apparently pushed by the Putin propaganda machine, that Ukrainians would welcome Russian invaders as liberators.
Barak Barfi is a former research fellow at New America and a former visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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