Two terrific pieces by Ben Judah on Vladimir Putin and the Russia he is making.

The first has achieved instant acclaim, a searching and meticulously researched account of a Day in The Life of the Russian President in his bullet-proof bubble. One powerful, perfectly turned paragraph after another:

And now power begins. The early afternoon is about briefing notes. This mostly takes place at his heavy wooden desk. These are offices without screens. The President uses only the most secure technologies: red folders with paper documents, and fixed-line Soviet Warera telephones.

The master begins his work day by reading three thick leather-bound folders. The first – his report on the home front compiled by the FSB, his domestic intelligence service. The second – his report on international affairs compiled by the SVR, his foreign intelligence. The third – his report on the court complied by the FSO, his army of close protection…

There are no stories of extravagance: only of loneliness. The President has no family life. His mother is dead. So is his father. His wife suffered nervous disorders, and after a long separation, there has been a divorce. There are two daughters. But they are a state secret and no longer live in Russia. There are rumours of models, photographers, or gymnasts that come to him at night. But there is a hollow tick to these stories, which no courtier can quite explain…

But in Russian time-zones his provincial governors, with their micro-garchs and their sallow police chiefs, use little tricks to deceive him. Recently, they were ashamed in Suzdal of their city of rotting wooden hutches so they covered them in tarpaulin facades of freshly painted cottages. They were ashamed in the factories and the military installations – hiding everything broken…

The President behaves as though he is made of bronze, as if he shines. He seems to know that they will flinch when meeting his eye. There is a silence around him. The voices of grown men change when they speak to him. They make their voices as low as possible. Their faces become solemn, almost stiffened. They look down: worried, ­nervous, alert…

“He looks emotionless, as if nothing really touches him,” the interpreter remembers. “As if he is hardly aware of what happens around him. As if he is paying little attention to these people. As if he is worn out… He has spent so long as an icon he is not used to anyone penetrating… He is not used to anything not being so perfectly controlled for him. He is isolated, trapped.”

“The impression… you get from being close to him is that he would have been quite happy to step down. But he knows he has failed to rule Russia in anything else but a feudal way. And the moment his grip falters… it will all come crashing down and he will go to jail… and Moscow will burn like Kiev.”

It’s tempting to think that Putin will rule Russia for another twenty years or more. What’s to stop him? But when you read this, you wonder if he could not come crashing down at any moment in some sort of grim palace coup led by a few top tough Russians who have concluded that he has lost the plot.

The other Ben Judah piece looks at the bigger picture:

In all these cases, the same bureaucratic malpractices killed large numbers of Russians: Putin’s developing dictatorship has eliminated all transparency, and chucked out any checks and balances. At the same time its incredible corruption has frozen the system in a state of untouchable incompetence. Now, they have sent this stealth intervention force in to Ukraine and it has completely screwed up. In the initial aftermath of the crash, Russian State TV was initially boasting that the rebel forces had shot down a Ukrainian military aircraft and then had to quickly alter their report.

The last point, for Russians, has always been the real rub: watching their officials, simply sneer at them, blinking and pretending nothing has happened, when really there should be Presidential apologies and heads should roll. Each of these disasters, one by one, has built up Russians’ anger towards the country’s autocratic and out of touch elite.

Vladimir Putin has dealt with each of these national tragedies in a similar fashion: with self-pity and hysterical accusations that sinister behind the scenes forces are driving them. The President has felt himself, in every case, let down, misinformed, even tricked—by his public officials and pliant bureaucrats. He has reacted, according to his own officials, with remarkable indulgence and self-pity towards himself, while shifting all the blame onto his minions as if he is somehow not fully responsible—after close to 15 years as Russia’s preeminent ruler…

Vladimir Putin has reacted to all these Russian disasters the same way: he cannot do empathy. He is not one of those politicians who can connect with the mourners, or turn their grief into his theater, and lead the nation’s tragedy. Rather, he has reacted to each incident, coldly, like someone who cannot understand that he, and not his petty officials, is to blame for Russia’s rotten chain of command.

Russians, are used to being abused, and treated like cattle, by Russia’s rulers. The skin-crawling reports from the crash site of the MH17—tossed corpses, pillaged suitcases, credit cards stolen from the dead—are all unremarkable reports for the Russian public. They know this is how dead bodies are treated by Russian bureaucrats. The difference this time is that those bodies are mostly European corpses, and that self-pitying, Presidential sneer, is looking into the eyes of the West.

This last point is part of our general negotiating problem with Putin now: how to engage with him privately on the level of leader-to-leader trust?

See for example this truly astonishing video from a few years back. It astonishes for various reasons simultaneously, but above all it shows how President Putin deliberately operates on a psychological level designed to startle and humiliate foreign partners, even in public (or perhaps especially in public):

So when our leaders want to talk to this cunning, powerful and (in some key respects) amazingly effective Russian leader about Ukraine, how to have any hope of getting through to him and establishing some sort of operational private trust? The sense of his combined isolation and indifference conveyed so well by Ben Judah shows that this task is getting harder as Russia and the key European governments and Washington together ratchet up the mutual suspicions and associated ‘sanctions’.