Peter Pomerantsev writes:

As Bashar al-Assad fell, Russian nationalist military bloggers turned on the Kremlin. “Ten years of our presence,” fumed the “Two Majors” Telegram channel to its more than one million subscribers, “dead Russian soldiers, billions of spent roubles and thousands of tonnes of ammunition, they must be compensated somehow.” Some didn’t shy away from lambasting Vladimir Putin. “The adventure in Syria, initiated by Putin personally, seems to be coming to an end. And it ends ignominiously, like all other ‘geopolitical’ endeavours of the Kremlin strategist.” These weren’t isolated incidents. Filter Labs, a data analytics company I collaborate with, saw social media sentiment on Syria dip steeply as Assad fell.

It was in stark contrast to Putin’s silly claim at his annual news conference last week that Russia had suffered no defeat in Syria. Unlike social media, legacy media tried to walk the Kremlin line, but even here there were splits. “You can bluff on the international arena for a while – but make sure you don’t fall for your own deceptions”, ran an op-ed in the broadsheet Kommersant, penned by a retired colonel close to the military leadership. He then used Syria as an example of how “in today’s world, victory is only possible in a quick and fleeting war. If you effectively win in a matter of days and weeks, but cannot quickly consolidate your success in military and political terms, you will eventually lose no matter what you do.” Though the piece didn’t mention Ukraine, Vasily Gatov, a media analyst at the University of Southern California, told me he thought it was a message from the general staff to the Kremlin: be realistic about what we can achieve in Ukraine, too.

Assad’s fall is not just a blow to Russia’s interests in the Middle East but to the essence of Putin’s power, which has always been about perception management. His early spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky once explained to me how, when the Kremlin was weak domestically in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Russian leaders learned to dominate TV to create ersatz grandeur. The Kremlin couldn’t really control the regional governors at that point, but it could give the sense that the president ruled everything by being omnipresent in the media. Since then, Putin has taken perception management to the international stage, trying to tell a story that he is leading a new generation of authoritarian regimes destined to inherit the earth. But that image suddenly looks shaky. Now is the time to apply more pressure before he can patch things up and project his superpower movie once again. [Continue reading…]