for The Hill

Since his election as president in 2000, Vladimir Putin has methodically consolidated power in his hands with the expressed aim of making Russia great again. Instead, he’s diminished his country’s power and global standing in every respect but one — Moscow’s ability to threaten its neighbors with nuclear weapons.

Russian observers have characterized Putin’s increasingly autocratic reign as a tacit pact with Russian society: The Kremlin won’t interfere in the everyday lives of citizens if they stay out of politics. It’s a bad bargain for the Russian people.   

For one thing, it’s cost them a rare shot at governing themselves after centuries of czarist and totalitarian despotism. Over the past two decades, Putin has steadily snuffed out post-Soviet Russia’s incipient democracy — rigging elections, jailing dissidents and journalists, suppressing independent civic associations and colluding in the assassination of regime critics at home and around the world.

A genuinely free market economy governed by impartial laws also has been sacrificed on the altar of Putin’s “vertical of power.” He’s enabled a handful of oligarchs to take over former state-owned corporations controlling key assets like, oil, gas and finance in return for their acquiescence in his neo-imperial adventurism.  

Now, the kleptocrats’ giant yachts have been impounded in foreign ports and Russia’s economy is contracting under pressure from international sanctions. Moscow’s European customers have sharply cut back on energy imports from Russia (gas is down by 88 percent over the past year), a vital source of the hard currency Putin needs to finance his war.

Russia’s once-imposing military reputation lies in tatters. Ukrainian defense forces are liberating large swaths of eastern and southern Ukraine, making a mockery of the Russian parliament’s vote last week to annex these regions.