This December 19, the “Review of the year” of Vladimir Putin, this traditional self-satisfaction session that the Russian president performs in front of an audience of journalists, risks being very gloomy. Because the news piling up on his desk is hardly encouraging. First there is Georgia, on the verge of insurrection after the government’s recent decision to suspend the process of joining the European Union. In the streets for two weeks, Georgians have also denounced massive fraud during the recent legislative elections. “They bear the signature of the Russian services,” President Salomé Zourabichvili accused last week in L’Express. The risk of a new Maidan has never been greater in this former Soviet republic, which Putin absolutely wants to keep in his fold. Will he organize a repression to bring this country into line, as he did in Belarus? Possible, but so far his maneuvers have failed.
Then there is Romania, the target, during the recent presidential campaign, of a massive disinformation operation on social networks. In the sights of the Romanian secret services, the Kremlin, which wanted to bring a pro-Russian candidate to power. Here again, the attack failed, the vote was postponed until next year.
Finally, the fall of Bashar al-Assad constitutes a major setback for the Russian autocrat. Focused on Ukraine, Russia was unable to “stop this literal march through Syria, a country it has protected for years,” as Donald Trump wrote on his social network, Truth. And finds itself very weakened in a strategic region for it.
Bad news for Putin, whom the pitiful flight of his protégé Bashar al-Assad surely gives pause for thought. Because no one, not even him, had measured the advanced decomposition of the Syrian regime, which collapsed in ten days like a house of cards. Russia is certainly not at that stage. But who knows what the Russian elites really think, while the war is dragging on in Ukraine and the economy, behind its Potemkin facade, is showing worrying signs of overheating? Everything can move very quickly, Putin knows it. He has not forgotten the mad rush on Moscow by one of his most loyal minions, Yevgeny Prigojine, who, in the summer of 2023, caused his throne to waver overnight. And where he suddenly found himself very alone. Like a certain Bashar al-Assad.