It seems that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s strategy to take the war into the front rooms of Russian citizens actually worked and forced the Kremlin to add an extraordinary 20pp to United Russia’s “win” in last week’s election. Except that the Kremlin has such a tight grip on power it didn’t spark the colour revolution that would have saved Ukraine’s bacon this winter.

I talked about election thresholds in a recent blog and with the additional 20pp margin, Russian President Vladimir Putin is playing with fire. As I explained, although it looked like a Potemkin election, the numbers are actually important.

On paper (actually on screen this time) United Russia won 57.83% of the party-list vote and 355 of 450 seats in the almost final count. That clears the 300+ threshold easily to give it a constitutional majority.

But, going into the vote, even the state pollsters said United Russia was going to get 35.6% of the vote which is equivalent to 219 seats –not enough to cross even the threshold for a straight majority of 226 seats. To get just that UR would need to garner at least 36.8% of the votes by IntelliNews calculations.

So, if the elections had been free and fair, we would have gone back to the democratic parliaments of the Yeltsin-era (and as KPRF leaders Zyuganov said in a presser yesterday, complete chaos). But to avoid that, the Kremlin only needed to add 1-2% of extra votes to the UR ticket. Easy peasy.

Adding 20% is a very dangerous thing to do. In the 2011 election, UR was doing equally badly, on course to miss the majority until the Kremlin added an estimated 13% to push it over the top to a simple majority. That was enough to so outrage the population (of Moscow at least) that it sparked mass demonstrations with 100,000 people on the street and violent clashes with the OMON stopping people from crossing the river to protest in front of the Kremlin itself.

I was there. It was a heady time. Openly defiant crowds gathered in the Bolotnaya park across the river and sang and chanted. There was a real revolutionary atmosphere. Until it all got ugly of course. But it was as close as Russia has comes to a colour revolution in the last 30 years.

Since then, the rule-of-thumb has been: if the Kremlin adds more than ten percentage points to the tally, it risks sparking a Maidan-style revolt.

That is why the 20% differential is so extraordinary. Why did Putin risk it? The general take away is that he needed to as the war is a lot less popular than you would think and by winning more seats than it did last year, the Kremlin can argue that the vote was a referendum on the war after all – and the people showed they were for the war by increasing UR’s count.

What the real result shows – and we have done the same piece we do every election on statistical evidence that shows just how much the vote was fixed – this vote really was a referendum on the war. And the Russians voted against it.

This was exactly the point of Zelenskiy’s upping the game and taking the fight to Russia to start a fuel crisis and the warehouse war, bombing Wildberries into oblivion. It worked. The Russians are pissed off and not a little scared.

Where it didn’t work, even the extra 20% was not enough to spark a Russian Maidan. There have been no protests at all. The one man, who is in a position to start those protests, is Communist party leaders Gennady Zyuganov who openly said on telly UR had stolen a big chunk of his shares and… nothing else. Had he called “aux barricades!” something might have happened. But he didn’t say that in 2021, when the thieving of KPRF shares, especially in the Moscow vote, was even more blatant, and he won’t say it this time.

Hat tip to Zelenskiy for getting this far. He has backed the Kremlin into a very comfortable corner and forced Putin to take a very serious risk that could have ended the war on Ukraine’s  terms. But it didn’t work as Putin has not been idle over the last decade and since the arrest of Navalny, the switch from repression-lite that allowed things like a 100,000-strong march in Moscow, to the fully fledged real thing, Putin’s grip on power is so strong that 10% rule-of-thumb needs to be revised and increased to 20% now.

All said and done, Russia remains an authoritarian-lite regime and there is a limit to how far Putin can push it. The result is still a balancing act, but what’s left of the let-off-steam values after the ejection of liberal anti-war party Yabloko from the Duma and the curtailing of the New People party, means under the surface pressure is building.

What does that mean in practise? It means Putin needs to finish this war as soon as he can. It’s gone on too long and Zelenskiy is proving to be too creative in using what little resources he has to create real headaches for Putin.

Energy ceasefire

Everyone is at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) this week (even Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov) and there is a lot of talk about an “energy ceasefire”. You can absolutely see why Zelenskiy wants this, but the irony of this growing pressure means it is even less likely that Putin will agree.

Russia already had superiority in missile power and production has been massively ramped up in the last year. Now it has superiority in drones as well with the new Geran-4, Geran-5 and Banderol cruise missile-lite, not to mention its arsenal of cruise missile-heavies, which Ukraine barely has at all. And this winter is about to start just as Ukraine fires off its very last PAC-3 interceptors. On top of that, Ukraine is running out of money and has no way of plugging a $27bn hole in the defence budget – other than persuading the EU (aka Belgium) to hand over the frozen $200bn of CBR assets.

No one wants to say it out loud but read between the lines of the news coming out of the UNGA: Ukraine is a sitting duck and everyone knows it.

As a post scriptum to this narrative, in my view the rising panic in Bankova and Brussels is driving all this “Russia will attack Nato” talk. I just dug into this yesterday and while the Europe elite are pushing this very hard, the serious commentators – national security services, professional security analysts and many respected milbloggers – say it can’t happen simply as Russia has 90% of its troops committed in Ukraine. If the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) defence collapses, then, maybe. But now? It can’t be done.

BTW this problem provides a very clear acid test of it the Kremlin does intend to invade Nato: if Putin goes ahead with the widely discussed general mobilisation now the elections are over, and calls up half a million men, then, and only then, should Nato be worried. However, even in this event, the goal could simply be to flood Donbas with troops to end the war quickly.

Mobilisation remains highly unlikely as it also comes with the danger of being the spark that ignites the growing pressure in Russian society identified above. If adding 20pp to UR’s election result was risky, the risks associated with a general mobilisation are off the chart. However, with the decisions to invade Ukraine in the first place, Putin has become a lot less predictable than he was before the war and shown himself to be capable of taking crazy risks if pushed into his “rat corner.”

This is a repeat of the WMD fearmongering ahead of the Iraq war and the “turning point” hype ahead of the Ankara Nato summit this summer. It’s an “enemy at the gate” narrative that everyone uses to gee up support for more sacrifices in the service of geopolitics. But it risks talking ourselves into WWIII. Bottom line is the turning point ruse didn’t work in Ankara and the Nato attacked talk this time is even more unlikely to work ahead of this winter’s campaign. Zelenskiy met with Trump yesterday and all he got out of it was a demand to stop bombing Russian diesel production becase that is costing Trump at the polls, as far as I can see.

This article originally appeared in Editor’s Picks, a free daily email digest of bne IntelliNews’ best stories from the last 24 hours. Sign up for free here.

https://to989.infusionsoft.com/app/form/editors-picks-subscribers