Mark Galeotti

One thing we know that Putin reads is history. He’s keen on chronicles and biography of great Russians, presumably with an eye to his own reputation. And this may help explain why he's increasingly trying to control his country’s backstory. In Russia, 1 September is not just the start of the school year, it is Den’ Znanii or ‘knowledge day'. There is a whole ritual, a celebratory welcome to all the new crop of children coming from kindergarten to big school, with sonorous speeches about the value of learning and the promise of a new generation. For the head of state, this is usually a softball opportunity to play the role of father of the nation.

Sometimes, Vladimir Putin just can’t help himself. Russian coverage of the popular revolution in neighbouring Belarus has been unusually even-handed, perhaps reflecting a belief that strongman Alexander Lukashenko might be on the ropes. Then Putin, having been quiet about Belarus for so long, used an interview with a tame TV journalist to drop a bombshell: a reserve force has been established that could intervene. Apparently Lukashenko had asked him ‘to create a reserve group of law enforcement personnel’ which could be deployed if ‘the situation becomes uncontrollable, when extremist elements… overstep the mark.

Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny is, as of writing, fighting for his life, hooked to a ventilator in a hospital in Omsk. He was flying back to Moscow from Tomsk when he fell suddenly ill, and many assume poison. Think the government did it? Of course not: according to the Kremlin’s lead propagandist, it was us. Navalny’s efforts to establish a nation-wide political party in all but name – every time he tries to register a party, the Kremlin finds a way to disallow it – and his glossy exposés of elite corruption presumably struck a chord at a time when the city of Khabarovsk is still protesting the arrest of its elected governor and Belarus offers an implicit commercial for people power.

It’s hard to believe Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko will retain his half-affectionate, half-exasperated nickname ‘Batka’ (Dad) after his re-election yesterday in a presidential vote rigged beyond the point of farce, which led to violent street protests across the country. Despite claims he had fled the country, the ‘last dictator in Europe’ made it through the night – but his regime is now nearing its end. Lukashenko has been more-or-less firmly ensconced in Belarus since 1994, and under his rule the country has remained a strange Soviet-capitalist hybrid.

Putin has his result. After a week of postal, online and in-person voting, his controversial package of constitutional amendments that mean he could stay in office until 2036 has been passed by a hefty margin of 78 per cent voted in favour and 21 per cent against, with a turnout of just under two-thirds of the electorate. That Putin got the endorsement he wanted is, in fairness, not the biggest surprise of the year. The irony is, though, that however rigged they may be, Russian elections, referenda and plebiscites do matter. The Kremlin will ultimately get or at least claim the result it wants. The real question is how much effort it has to put into getting it. How much propaganda needs to be pumped out? How many dissenting voices silenced? How much money spent on sweeteners?

Putin does like to spring a surprise. The first hour or so of his state of the nation address yesterday was the usual fare: Russia standing tall again, measures to address poverty, encouraging larger families. So far, so cut and paste. Then suddenly he dropped a series of constitutional bombshells: tougher presidential term limits, more powers for both parliament and the prime minister. Within three hours, prime minister Dmitry Medvedev was clearing his desk, and we had a sense of the shape of Russia after Putin’s presidency. Which is not, by any means, Russia after Putin. His current term ends in 2024, and although no one doubted he could stay on if he wanted, regardless of term limits, the real question was whether he truly wanted to.

At the last minute, the Russian police general everyone had assumed was a shoo-in to become the next head of Interpol was defeated by the acting head, South Korean Kim Jong-yang. It’s good news for the international police cooperation organisation, for the West and, arguably, for justice – but it’s not the end of the story. The presumed front-runner, major general Alexander Prokopchuk – formerly the head of Russia's Interpol bureau – has been accused of supervising the systematic attempt to apparently use the agency to persecute the Kremlin's political enemies. Nonetheless, until the eleventh hour, everyone saw Prokopchuk as the heir apparent. Moscow certainly seems to have thought so.

Suddenly Russian spies seem funny rather than fearsome. 'More Johnny English than James Bond’ as Security Minister Ben Wallace put it, as if the Salisbury pair had not killed on British soil. It’s certainly true that we have seen some big blunders on the part of the GRU, Russian military intelligence: Sergei Skripal’s would-be assassins presenting themselves as innocent sports nutritionists with a taste for thirteenth-century ecclesiastical architecture. Hackers caught in the Netherlands with laptops that had not been sanitised between operations. The names of 305 GRU officers made public because they registered their cars at their base, presumably in order to avoid paying car tax.