Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Sergei Savostyanov / Sputnik / Kremlin Pool) Why did Russian leader Vladimir Putin change his mind about joining the BRICS summit hosted by SA next month? In case you missed it, the presidency announced that Russia would instead be represented by foreign minister Sergey Lavrov “by mutual agreement”.
We don’t know why Putin changed his mind, but you have to hand it to President Cyril Ramaphosa; he knows how to take things to the brink and stare people down.
Ramaphosa held the line in difficult circumstances and deserves credit for not allowing SA – and the BRICS grouping, by the way – to be bullied by a notorious bully.
But that’s not all there was to it, I’m willing to bet. There are at least four possible reasons Putin decided to back down.
First, for all dictators, there is always the risk that if you leave the country, it might not be there when you come back. This is a syndrome African leaders, both of the democratic and military sort, know pretty well. In Ghana, it happened twice – once in 1966 when President Kwame Nkrumah was ousted by a group of army officers while he was on an official visit to Vietnam, and again in 1972 when Prime Minister Kofi Busia was in London for medical treatment. It also happened twice in Gambia. Altogether, 10 African countries have seen power grabs while the head of state was out of town.
Whether you believe this or not depends on the extent to which you think Putin’s position is under threat, particularly now that Yevgeny Prigozhin is, theoretically at least, under control in exile in Belarus.
My guess is that the threat of a revolt remains present, but it’s sufficiently unlikely to be the most important deciding factor, though the Russian administration must be in absolute chaos – how could it be otherwise?
Given the decision by Western companies to pull out, the oligarchs are now feeding on discarded assets, so rumours of their disquiet are probably overdone.
For example, Putin has now ordered the seizure of Danone and Carlsberg’s Russian operations after businessmen close to the Kremlin expressed an interest in these assets, according to people close to the decision, the FT is reporting.
On Tuesday, the government appointed Yakub Zakriev, Chechnya’s agriculture minister, as head of the Danone business and installed Taimuraz Bolloev, a longtime friend of Putin, as director of Carlsberg’s Baltika subsidiary.
The second possibility is that the Russians were genuinely concerned about the risk of Putin getting arrested in SA and shipped off to The Hague. Obviously, SA would try to avoid that outcome, but SA is notoriously a bit of a mess diplomatically, so anything could happen.
Just one example: I was amused to see the list of items which were included in the presidential security detail’s stock on board the SAA flight that was grounded in Warsaw, Poland, two weeks ago. There were guns, of course, but nothing really out of the ordinary.
But the security detail thought it necessary to bring along 1,400 water bottles, 20 sleeping bags, 10 tents and 137 rat packs. This, for a crew of 126 security personnel. So that means 1.0873 rat packs per person for the two-week trip and roughly 10 people per sleeping bag. Might be a tight fit, but, you know, at least they’ll have water.
Overall, a risk, but also not the deciding factor.
The third possibility is that the Russians did not want to be the cause of a rift between SA and the US which would jeopardise SA’s valuable trade relationships. At this suggestion, one has to just laugh. Despite enormously high food inflation around the world, particularly in Africa, the Russians have just rescinded the Black Sea grain deal, an act that has increased the wheat price by 9%. So, that reason is unlikely.
The fourth and to me most likely reason is that Indian prime minister Narendra Modi changed his mind. I suspect that the votes in the BRICS group on the issue of Putin attending in person split with SA against, Russia obviously in favour, China in favour, and India and Brazil on the fence.
But while SA has been focusing on Russia, Modi had a very successful (and very under-reported here) trip to the US and France, where he has been welcomed with open arms and indeed given pledges of the more weaponised kinds of arms traditionally only Russia has provided India.
My guess is that Modi does not want to jeopardise these newly established relations with Europe and the US over something as comparatively trivial as Putin’s desire to be photographed with other world leaders.
Who knows what happens behind the creaking doors of diplomacy?
It’s a huge relief that Putin is not coming, but as my podcast colleague Mark Barnes points out in our latest effort, there is at least one disappointment in this outcome.
If Putin had come, and since former president Jacob Zuma is now due to go to jail, we might have been able to do a prisoner swap! DM