Vladimir Putin is weak but more dangerous

With New Year’s Eve having been the 25th anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s accession to power, his lacerating confrontation with Azerbaijan over the shooting down of a passenger aircraft last week speaks volumes about the lawless rogue state Russia has become under his prolonged tyrannical rule.

There was a time, as The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, when Moscow held sway over its former Soviet republics. Invariably, they would servilely accept the Kremlin’s diktat.

That is clearly what Putin expected when, unusually, he offered a half apology for what experts have concluded was Russia’s responsibility for the catastrophic shooting down over Kazakhstan of the Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer 190 aircraft that killed 38 passengers.

But Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev would have none of what he described as Putin’s “foolish and dishonest” attempt to blame the disaster on a flock of birds and put it in the context of Russian air defences in southern Russia responding to a Ukrainian drone attack.

Instead, Mr Aliyev accused Putin of attempting to cover up a Russian missile strike that appears to have been remarkably similar to the 2014 Russian missile attack over eastern Ukraine that brought down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, killing 298 people including 38 Australian citizens and residents.

Mr Aliyev is right to have rejected Putin’s obfuscation and crocodile tears and to demand compensation. Doing so, however, as The Wall Street Journal reported, “lays bare Russia’s diminished influence in swaths of its former empire and beyond in the wake of its war in Ukraine”. It underlines the depth of the increasing frustration the Putin regime faces over the fallout from its war against Ukraine.

As the BBC’s Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg reported in noting Putin’s quarter century of autocratic rule, the Moscow tyrant’s invasion of Ukraine has had “devastating consequences” – mostly for Ukraine but also for Russia, which has sustained heavy losses on the battlefield.

The Times reports that Putin’s hold on power is shaky. He has suppressed public anger over heavy Russian losses, clamps down on dissent, has the full-throated backing of leaders of the corrupt Russian Orthodox Church and ruthlessly cows any potential threats to his incumbency with “regrettable events” such as the “accident” in 2023 that brought down the aircraft carrying the Wagner Group’s mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, the vainglorious would-be challenger for his power.

No one should be fooled by Putin’s rare half-apology over the downing of the Azerbaijani aircraft and what it portends for his increasingly frustrated regime. But neither should they underestimate the need for the defences necessary to stand up to Putin’s lawless aggression that seeks to make Ukraine and other countries prey to his hegemonic strategic ambitions.