As the articles of impeachment against U.S. President Donald Trump were sent from the House to the Senate on Thursday, Vladimir Putin — who has had a stranglehold on power in Russia since the last day of the 20th century — revealed a bold plan to effectively make himself ruler for life.
The Russian dictator did so Wednesday by elaborating on constitutional changes that would allow him to remain in power after his current presidential term ends in 2024. Putin, who is already 67 years old, intends to continue to rule Russia by becoming prime minister, or head of a supreme council, or chairman of a parliament comprised largely of Putin loyalists, or somehow presiding at the top of a new government pyramid while converting the presidency into much more of a ceremonial post.
In the first step in a complicated scheme designed to circumvent Russian law and allow himself to remain in charge, Putin got his prime minister, Dimitri Medvedev, and the cabinet to resign en masse. Within minutes of a national television address by Putin, his elections commissioner declared that she was ready to hold a referendum “at a moment’s notice” to rubber-stamp approval of the constitutional amendments that the president was demanding. This bit of legerdemain, which would never be tolerated in a western country, is required to get around a bar to Putin standing for office again when his current term ends in four years.
Viewed from a distance, the moves in Moscow and Washington suggest Putin is still ascendant and that Trump’s political future is less rosy. Being an autocrat with almost unlimited political power to bend the political system to his whims, Putin’s path may appear to be easier. But Trump arguably has stronger backing at home at the moment than the strongman in the Kremlin, whose personal popularity has been in slow decline since he got huge public backing in the spring of 2014 for the annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea and the waging of a proxy war in eastern Ukraine.
Though unintended, it is ironic that the constant sideshow to the Trump-Putin saga always somehow involves Ukraine. The latest coincidence was the shootdown last week of a Ukrainian jetliner over Iran by Russian-made missiles that were fired because the Iranians claim to have believed that they were under attack by U.S. cruise missiles. The crash of that aircraft recalled Russia’s shootdown of a Malaysian jetliner over Ukraine with the loss of 298 souls in 2014.
Notwithstanding more damning evidence for Trump’s impeachment trial from Kyiv involving alleged skullduggery by a Ukrainian cabinet minister, the president’s ambition to win a second four-year term this fall still looks likely to succeed. Trump will probably survive because for all the black theatre expected in Washington in the coming days, it is most unlikely a highly partisan Republican-dominated Senate will throw the president out.
A strong contributing factor is that the president has overseen an economic boom that Canada has benefited greatly from, though few Canadians want to admit it. Trump is also being helped by the Democrats’ astonishing inability so far to find an electable presidential candidate (shades of Andrew Scheer).
Polls published this week show that by a narrow margin, Americans disagreed with Trump’s ordering the killing in Iraq of Iran’s No. 2, Maj.-Gen. Qassem Soleimani, on Jan 8. But the death of the world’s most notorious terrorist mastermind has played extraordinarily well with the president’s large political base. This could be seen in the tumultuous hero’s welcome Trump got on Monday evening at the NCAA football championship in New Orleans.
The president’s triumphant entrance in Louisiana contrasted sharply with the savage reviews that Trump’s Iranian gambit has received from much of the world and in particular from Justin Trudeau, whose criticisms received global attention. The prime minister has indirectly but clearly blamed the U.S. president for the deaths of 57 Canadians who were aboard the Ukrainian jet that was shot out of the night sky two days after Soleimani’s death. Trudeau did so even after Tehran acknowledged that its missiles had struck the Boeing 737 killing all 176 passengers and crew because of a terrible mistake that had been made by one of its missile battery crews.
It is hard to get an accurate fix on Putin’s personal popularity because polling is difficult at the best of times in Russia. But it appears that the former spy is far less popular today than a few years ago. With the Russian economy struggling and frequent street protests against his autocratic style, Putin has decided to try to survive by concentrating more power in his own hands, as China’s Xi Jinping has done.
The U.S. attack on Soleimani, the Ukrainian aircraft shootdown, the Senate impeachment process, which results from help that Trump allegedly sought in Ukraine to assist his re-election campaign, and Putin’s self-serving constitutional hijinks, are obviously separate issues. But they have somehow become linked to each other. They are fitting new chapters to the unexpected and unprecedented mutual admiration that sprang up between Trump and Putin during the last U.S. presidential election in 2016.
The latest chapter in this bromance is that Trump’s and Putin’s fights to remain in power began on the same day. The smart money would never bet against either of the presidents. Nor, I guess, would the smart money ever bet against another improbable Ukrainian connection to the fates of Trump and Putin.
Matthew Fisher is an international affairs columnist and foreign correspondent who has worked abroad for 35 years. You can follow him on Twitter at @mfisheroverseas
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