Putin’s War: Attachment 2

Attachment #2: Russian History

A selective primer

Examining the key dates and activities highlighted next, one comes away with the following: The Russian state over many, many years has suffered under the control and influence of one powerful dictator after another; that the country has never really reached the potential the size of the country and its physical resources suggest could be there; that the masses have been subjugated off and on for centuries; that Russia, with the exception of being an ally during WWII, has been a philosophical opponent of the West and in particular the US; that Russians perhaps have reason to be paranoid in that they have been invaded (as Gwynne Dyer has said in his column) by the “A team of would-be world conquerors (the Mongols, Napoleon, Hitler) and live in a country with no ‘natural’ frontiers”; that Russia has been ruled through power rather than by the law; and that the current regime has steadily deteriorated into that of one driven by a single, obsessed man directing a repressive system with a seriously flawed view of history.

According to Andrei Zorin, a professor of Russian at the University of Oxford, Russia’s historical narrative is to a large extent defined by miraculous transformations that turn even the most humiliating defeats into apocalyptic triumphs. “The traditional stories of major Russian wars, be it against the Poles in the 17th century, the Swedes in the 18th, the French in the 19th or the Germans in the 20th, all follow the same pattern. After initial defeats that put the country on the brink of utter ruin, a strong leader mobilizes the nation and imposes a devastating defeat on the enemy.” For a Putin who is influenced by history, this is heady stuff.

Takeaways about Russia from this history, and Putin’s attack on Ukraine 

As Michael Ignatieff wrote in the Globe & Mail on March 5, in each of the cases of Russia crushing free people (the Hungarians, Czechs and Poles and now the Ukrainians) they “appealed to Western Europe and the US to intervene. Their appeals went unheard. In each of these cases, Western governments decided to not risk nuclear war. Their restraint saved the peace but betrayed the peoples of Eastern Europe. This time is different.” 

The risks are high. It is not out of the question that as Europe and NATO funnel in weapons to the Ukranian fighters, Putin will be tempted to threaten military action against NATO itself, possibly Poland. And here’s the big issue. As Ignatieff says “Mr. Putin will be tempted to threaten to use nuclear weapons, and if his gamble fails, and he faces defeat, and loss of power, we cannot exclude the possibility that he would use a tactical nuclear strike to hold on through sheer terror.” 

NATO thus has to stick by its Article 5 guarantee. Ignatieff is not ambiguous: “The Russian’s need to understand that if they stage a military incursion across the NATO border… they will be met by force, and if that fails to hold them, they will be met with nuclear weapons, at first tactical, and then as necessary, strategic, too.”

Some selected dates in Russian history

I admit to this history being somewhat skewed, as it tends to select some of the more negative events in recent Russian history. But it does make a point. As well, history has always been selective, depending upon who is doing the selection.

• Russia in its 1,000 year plus history has never had democracy (except for Yeltsin’s attempts in the 1990s that resulted in gangster capitalism, economic collapse, devalued ruble and 80% inflation; the early years of Putin were another short-lived attempt) 
• 9th-12th century: Kievan Rus – a powerful East Slavic state dominated by the city of Kiev. Shaped in the 9th century it went on to flourish for the next 300 years. The empire is traditionally seen as the beginning of Russia
• 980-1015: Vladimir the Great had consolidated the Rus’ realm from modern-day Belarus, Russia and Ukraine to the Baltic Sea and had solidified the frontiers against incursions. He converted to Christianity in 988 and Christianized the Kievan Rus’ (thus he also known as Saint Vladimir)
• 13th century: Kievan Rus was invaded by the Tatars. Their state, the Empire of the Golden Horde, ruled over Russian lands for almost three centuries
• 1547: Ivan IV (the Terrible), who was also Grand Duke of Moscow, became the first Tsar
• 1552: Ivan crushed the Tatar stronghold of Kazan. The campaign began Russia’s expansion into Siberia, annexing a large Muslim population 
• 1613: the nobles chose Mikhail Romanov, one of the closest surviving relatives of the royal family, as Tsar. The Romanov dynasty ruled Russia until the 1917 Revolution brought an end to the Tsarist state
• 1686: Treaty of Perpetual Peace, in which the Polish-Lithuania Commonwealth agreed that Kyiv, among other territories, belonged to the Czardom of Russia
• 1696: Peter the Great became Russia’s de facto ruler; he transformed Russia into a European state 
• 1703: Peter the Great started his most dramatic project – a brand new capital on the Gulf of Finland. At tremendous human and financial cost, St. Petersburg sprang up
• 1721: Peter assumed the title of Emperor and Russia officially became the Russian Empire
• 1762: Catherine II (Catherine the Great) came to power in a coup d’état against her husband
• 1812: Napoleon leaves Moscow (Russian attacks; lack of food and shelter; bitter cold)
• 1815: Congress of Vienna, an international diplomatic conference to reconstitute the European political order after the downfall of the French Emperor Napoleon I. Switzerland was given neutralization status
• 1848: the Communist Manifesto by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels; recognized as one of the world’s most influential political documents. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle and the conflicts of capitalism
• 1861: Tsar Alexander II (the Liberator-Tsar), freed 20 million serfs (arguably the single most important event in 19th century Russian history) 
• 1867: Russia sold its colony of Alaska to the US; Russian nationalists still complain they were cheated
• 1894: Nicholas II came to power, but the revolutionary socialist movement was growing
• 1905: Russian Revolution suppressed, but Nicholas II had to concede major reforms, among them a constitution and the creation of the first Parliament, the Duma
• 1914: the First World War starts; Russia’s economy collapses; riots break out
• 1917: Nicholas II abdicates marking the end of imperial rule in Russia
• 1917: Bolshevik Revolution, following which Russia withdrew from WWI, effectively abandoning allies (including Canada) and prolonging the conflict for them. As a result, the Bolshevik regime was not recognized by allied governments, nor were Bolshevik leaders invited to peace negotiations at Paris that resulted in the Treaty of Versailles
• 1918: Nicholas and his family imprisoned/executed (July); Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin seized power (assault on the Winter Palace became the defining moment of the October revolution)
• 1917-1922: The Russian Civil War (the Red Army organized by the Bolsheviks vs the White movement made up of Russia’s political and military forces)
• 1919: Treaty of Versailles; this ended the war between Germany and the Allied Powers (Russia, France, Britain, Italy, Japan, US); the peace treaty was concluded at the Paris Peace Conference
• 1922: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was born. Initially, the new nation only had four members: the Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Transcaucasian Soviet republics. Joseph Stalin becomes General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; by the 1930s he consolidated power to become a dictator
• 1924: Lenin dies; he was the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924
• 1932-1933: Stalin’s Soviet Union caused a famine, leading to devastation in both Russia and Ukraine. For the latter, three million died in what is known as the Holodomor – Stalin’s reaction to rebellion from Ukranian peasantry
• 1934: USSR became a member of the League of Nations
• 1939, August: Russia and Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (the Hitler-Stalin Pact), which made the two dictators allies. Poland was partitioned between them; they marked out their “spheres of influence” across Finland, Estonia, Larvia, Lithuania and Romania. Stalin covertly partnered with Hitler to re-arm Nazi Germany
• 1939, Sept 1: start of WWII, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The UK & France declared war on Germany Sept 3
• 1939, November: the Winter War (orthe First Soviet-Finnish War), between the Soviet Union and Finland; it ended after 3 1/3 months with the Moscow Peace Treaty. Despite superior military strength the Soviet Union suffered severe losses and initially made little headway. The  League of Nations deemed the attack illegal and expelled the Soviet Union from the organisation on December 14, 1939
• 1940, June: Russia annexed Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and deported some 95,000 of their citizens to Siberia 
• 1940, May: the Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD (the Soviet secret police)
• 1941: Hitler’s invasion of Russia caught the USSR by surprise
• 1941 to 1944: the siege of Leningrad, one of the most lethal in world history, lasted for 900 days. The city survived, with heroic resistance. Think possibly Kyiv, Ukraine today
• 1942-43: the Battle of Stalingrad, where nearly one million perished
• 1944, May: Stalin deported the entire Crimean Tatar nation – roughly 200,000 people – from its homeland. The deportation is remembered as “the Exile”, an event of brutal dispossession and mass death. Thousands of the deportees died over the course of the journey from inhumane conditions, lack of water and food, and vicious treatment by Stalin’s NKVD. Thousands more perished from hunger, exposure, and disease in “special settlement camps” in Central Asia and Siberia, where they languished for nearly half a century
• 1945, February: the Yalta Conference (or Crimea Conference) was the meeting of the heads of government of the US (Franklin Roosevelt), the UK (Winston Churchill), and the Soviet Union (Joseph Stalin) to discuss the postwar reorganization of Germany and Europe. (Charles de Galle from France was excluded.) Here the Soviets agreed to join the UN because of a secret understanding of a voting formula with a veto power for permanent members of the Security Council, which ensured that each country could block unwanted decisions. Other countries in Central and Eastern Europe were occupied and converted into Soviet-controlled satellite states (the people’s Republic of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovak, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, East Germany). Stalin also did not honour his promise of free elections for Poland
• 1945. April: in the Battle for Berlin, there are horrific stories of rape by Russian soldiers of the German women (a taboo subject in Russia even today); counter stories of German soldiers raping Russian women abound
• 1945, August: the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima
• 1947: the Truman Doctrine – an American foreign policy that originated with the primary goal of containing Soviet geopolitical expansion during the Cold War 
• 1947-1991: the Cold War, generally considered to span the 1947 Truman Doctrine to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991
• 1949: NATO formed
• 1949: Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, ending the US monopoly on nuclear weaponry and kicking off the arms race 
• 1950: NSC 68 (the United States Objectives and Programs for National Security), a top secret US National Security Council policy paper developed for Truman. It advocated a large expansion in the military budget, the development of a hydrogen bomb, and increased military aid to allies. It made the rollback of global Communist expansion a high priority and rejected the alternative policies of friendly détente and containment of the Soviet Union
• 1951: Julius Rosenberg and his wife Ethel were convicted for theft of atomic secrets and executed two years later
• 1953: Joseph Stalin, one of history’s bloodiest rulers, dies. He ruled the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1953, becoming one of the most powerful and murderous dictators in history. He was a communist ideologically committed to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism 
• 1950-1954: the Red Scare in the US when Senator Joe McCarthy, a right-wing Republican, launched a series of highly publicized probes into alleged Communist penetration of the State Department, the White House, the Treasury, and even the US Army
• 1954: USSR’s bid to join NATO was rejected. Moscow hit back, establishing an Eastern counterpart, dubbed the Warsaw Pact. The struggle for global dominance, known as the Cold War, begins
• 1956-1964: Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, kicks off a campaign of “de-Stalinization”
• 1956: a national uprising in Budapest, Hungary was defeated by Soviet tanks; 2,500 people killed
• 1961: building of the Berlin Wall by the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) that ideologically and physically divided Berlin; portrayed as protecting the Eastern Bloc from fascist elements conspiring to prevent the “will of the people“ from building a socialist state in East Germany. It came down in 1989
• 1962: Cuban missile crisis: when the US discovered Soviet nuclear missiles on Cuba, President John F. Kennedy demanded their removal and announced a naval blockade of the island; the Soviet leader Khrushchev acceded to the US demands a week later
• 1964: Leonid Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev as First Secretary of the CPSU, the most powerful position in the USSR; Russia’s “stagnation” period although it achieved nuclear parity with the US; while he came up through the military, some historians saw Brezhnev as “peace loving”; succeeded by Yuri Andropov (who died in 1984)
• 1968: Brezhnev sent Soviet tanks into Prague, Czechoslovakia to end the “Prague Spring ” reform movement for national freedom.
• 1973: Yom Kippur War (or Ramadan War or the 1973 Arab-Israeli War). Following the outbreak of hostilities, both the US and the Soviet Union initiated massive resupply efforts to their respective allies during the war, which led to a near-confrontation between the two
• 1975: The Helsinki Final Act (Helsinki Accords) signed by then-existing European countries, US, Canada; an attempt to improve the détente between the East and the West
• 1978: Camp David Accords that followed the Yom Kippur war saw Israel return the entire Sinai Peninsula to Egypt and the subsequent 1979 Egyptian-Israel peace treaty, which marked the first instance of an Arab country recognizing Israel. Following peace with Israel, Egypt continued its drift away from the Soviet Union and eventually left the Soviet sphere of influence entirely
• 1979: start of Soviet War in Afghanistan – a contributing factor to the dissolution of the Soviet Union; they withdrew in 1989 
• 1981: martial law declared in Poland. While the tanks were Polish, the order to deploy them came from Moscow
• 1982: Yuri Andropov was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) after Leonid Brezhnev’s death, the first former head of the KGB to become General Secretary. For two long years he ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist
• 1985: Mikhail Gorbachev becomes General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and President of the Soviet Union (USSR) with 15 countries and 6 Eastern Bloc satellite nations (Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and East Germany; his “perestroika” and “glasnost” shook up the country; great debate regarding his legacy: either the restructuring of Russia’s economy and permitting freedoms to reverse decades of disastrous Stalinism or essentially the breakup of a country 
• 1985: in Geneva, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan embarked on a historic series of arms control talks
• 1989: democratic revolutions in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe tear down the Iron Curtain (the Berlin Wall)
• 1990: Iraq invades Kuwait 
• 1990-91: first Gulf War; the US-led coalition of 35 nations against Iraq in response to its invasion of Kuwait (Operation Desert Storm); the UN dismantles Hussein’s nuclear weapons program
• 1990, Feb 9: Putin claims that the US secretary of state James Baker, in a discussion with the Soviet leader, Gorbachev, made the promise that NATO would not expand to the east if Russia accepted Germany’s unification
• 1990, Sept 12: a treaty signed setting out how NATO troops could operate in the territory of the former East Germany. It allowed foreign-stationed NATO troops to cross the old cold war line marked by East Germany at the discretion of the German government. The agreement was contained in a signed addendum. NATO’s commitment to protect, enshrined in article 5, had for the first time moved east into former Russian-held territory
• 1991, August: referendum in Ukraine that led it to become an independent modern nation-state, effectively ending the USSR
• 1991, December: collapse of the Soviet Union. The presidents of the Russia Federation (Boris Yeltsin), Ukraine and Belarus meet and recognize each other’s Soviet Republics as independent nation-states (and told Gorbachev that the country he was head of no longer existed); the outcome, or the Belavezha Accords, put an end to the USSR, replacing it with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)
• 1991, December: Boris Yeltsin becomes he first elected president of the Russian Federal Republic within the USSR; what resulted was radical capitalist shock therapy (withdrawal of price controls; mass privatization of state assets; printing of more rubles resulting in hyperinflation); on top of that, Yeltsin was a serious alcoholic
• 1993: Yeltsin, in talks with the Polish leader, Lech Wałęsa, conceded Poland’s right to join NATO
• 1994: the Budapest Memorandum signed, obligating Russia and others to respect the sovereignty, independence, and existing borders of Ukraine. Ukraine was persuaded to give up the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world in exchange for guarantees for it’s territorial integrity and sovereignty 
• 1995-96: the First Russian-Chechen war was a rebellion by the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria against the Russian Federatiion. The first war was preceded by the Russian Intervention in Ichkeria, in which Russia tried to covertly overthrow the Ichkerian government. The initial campaign of 1994–1995 culminated in the devastating Battle of Grozny
• 1996: Yeltsin re-elected president, backed by Russia’s ”big seven” oligarchs (the Davos Pact)
• 1997: NATO-Russia Founding Act, a treaty designed to create a new relationship between the alliance and Russia. This was a political agreement – not a legally binding treaty – and it committed NATO to carry out its collective defence and other missions by “ensuring the necessary interoperability, integration, and capability for reinforcement rather than by additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces” on the territories of the former Warsaw Pact states. The Founding Act was an opportunity to build a new Europe by establishing mechanisms for dialogue and cooperation between Russia and NATO. Unfortunately, for some obvious reasons, it has failed.
• 1997: Putin becomes chief of Yeltsin’s presidential staff
• 1998: Vladimir Putin career goes meteoric – heads the KGB’s successor, the Federal Security Service (FSB)
• 1999, August: Putin appointed prime minister and Yeltsin’s chosen successor
• 1999, September: credible evidence that the Moscow bombings were a FSB plot set in motion by Putin as an excuse for bombing Chechnya to get a boost in the polls
• 1999: start of the Second Chechen War. Much better organized and planned than in the first Chechen War, the Russian armed forces took control of most regions
• 1999, New Year’s Eve: Yeltsin resigns, leaving power in the hands of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin
• 2000, March 26: Putin elected President of Russia in what his biographer Steven Myers said “would be the last election in Russia that could still arguably be called democratic.”
• 2000: Putin directed Russian forces that used brutal force to crush a Chechen rebel attack in the republic of Dagestan; they re-captured Grozny February 2000. (In 2003 the UN called Grozny the “most destroyed city on earth”)
• 2000, August: the nuclear-powered submarine Kursk, sank in an accident in the Barents Sea and all 118 personnel on board were killed; response was criticized as slow and inept. Putin initially continued his vacation at a seaside resort and only authorized the Russian Navy to accept British and Norwegian assistance after five days had passed
• 2002: 3-day siege of a Moscow theatre ended by an opiate pumped into theatre. 130 died. Originally blamed on Chechen terrorists. Strong subsequent evidence suggest the siege had been orchestrated by the FSB to vilify the Chechen rebels and burnish Putin’s strongman image
• 2003: Sergei Yushenkov, a liberal Russian lawmaker and an outspoken critic of Putin, was shot and killed in Moscow; deemed a political killing
• 2003: the so-called Rose Revolution in Georgia (that started the wave of “colour revolutions” that swept the former Soviet states)
• 2003: the US invades Iraq and installed a puppet government (that hanged Saddam Hussein). They guessed wrong about the regime having “weapons of mass destruction”
• 2004: the Orange Revolution, which toppled the pro-Kremlin regime in Ukraine. Ukrainians took to the streets to demand a genuine election, rather than the stage-managed farce that Putin’s regime had perfected. Viktor Yushchenko, the pro-Western politician (who had survived a poisoning attempt many believed was masterminded by the Kremlin) beat Viktor Yanukovych
• 2006: assassination of Alexander Litvinenko; Russia, and Putin, found responsible in British court
• 2006: Russian parliament passed a new “antiterrorist” law giving the FSB a license to kill enemies of the state on foreign soil. They followed this up with their first hit list
• 2007: Putin-backed United Russia Party won the parliamentary election; seen by many as a demonstration of strong support for the Russian leadership and its policies
• 2007: a famous speech by Putin was delivered to the Munich Security Conference, where he refused to accept the post-1989 settlement in Europe after the fall of the Berlin wall. Putin accused the west of forgetting and breaking assurances, leaving international law in ruins
• 2008: Putin supports First Deputy Prime Minister and gas giant Gazprom’s chairman Dmitry Medvedev as his preferred successor and agrees to head the government as prime minister after Medvedev wins the “election”
• 2008: Russia invasion of Abkhazia and South Odessa in Georgia. (It has not returned any of the occupied territories). It was the first time Russia had invaded a sovereign state since the fall of the USSR. Georgia remains independent today
• 2008: George W. Bush made a big mistake by inviting Ukraine to join NATO (but the other NATO members were never really going to let it in; it was considered too Far East, too close to Moscow)
• 2009: death of Ukrainian-born Russian tax attorney Sergei Magnitsky, responsible for exposing corruption and misconduct by Russian government officials while representing client Hermitage Capital Management and hedge-funder Bill Browder. He died in prison on trumped up charges after being refused medical care
• 2010, January: Viktor Yushchenko, as President of Ukraine (2005-10) and a proponent of NATO membership, officially rehabilitated one of Ukraine’s most controversial World War II-era figures, the ultranationalist leader Stepan Bandera, awarding him the title of Hero of Ukraine (Yanukovych stripped him of it immediately on assuming office)
• 2010: Viktor Yanukovych was elected president of Ukraine; the election was judged free and fair by international observers. Later he rejected a pending EU association agreement, choosing instead to pursue a Russian loan bailout and closer ties with Russia; he went into exile in Russia; was sentenced in absentia for high treason
• 2012: BP merges with Rosneft, a Russian state-controlled company. Rosneft becomes second largest shareholder of BP (and creates additional leverage for the Russian government in the UK)
• 2012: Putin retakes control from Medvedev in an election tainted by allegations of voter fraud
• 2012: murder in England of Alexander Perepilichnyy, a shadowy Russian multi-millionaire, who was involved (among many obscure schemes) in the Syrian chemical weapons program. He had blown the whistle on this and other Kremlin black-money schemes and escaped to England. A highly classified report to US Congress stated with “high confidence” that he had been assassinated on direct orders from Putin or people close to him
• 2013, November: Ukrainians went to Independence Square in Kyiv to protest the Russian-leaning government (the Euromaidan protests)
• 2014, February: Revolution of Dignity (Maidan Revolution) ousting of elected President Viktor Yanukovych and the overthrow of the Ukranian government 
• 2014, February: masked men wearing unmarked green flak jackets took the Crimean parliament; the annexation of Crimea stemmed from the overthrowing of Russian-allied president Viktor Yanukovych (who had been installed with the help of American political operative Paul Manafort). The current act of aggression by Russia is the latest in a war that really started then
• 2014, March: the Donetsk and Luhansk regions (the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine) were occupied. Russia has since armed and supported proxy forces; this war was Putin’s counter to the Revolution of Dignity
• 2014, May: Petro Poroshenko elected president of Ukraine on a platform of decommunization, inclusive capitalism, nationalism and Ukranian language. The events leading to his election were perceived by Moscow as a coup
• 2014: Russia thrown out of the G8
• 2014, July: Kremlin-backed forces in Donetsk shot down a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet, killing 298 people
• 2015: Putin’s leading opponent in the March presidential elections, Boris Nemtsov, was gunned down near the Kremlin; there was no resolution as to who killed him
• 2015: Russia intervened in the Syrian civil war on behalf of Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s dictator who gassed hundreds of his own people with internationally outlawed chemical weapons
• 2016: Russia conducted an aggressive online campaign that is said to have contributed to Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton
• 2017: The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), or the Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty, is the first legally binding international agreement to comprehensively prohibit nuclear weapons with the ultimate goal being their total elimination
• 2018: the poisoning, with a Russian-developed Noivichok nerve agent, of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military officer and double agent for the British intelligence agency, and his daughter, in Salisbury, England; they survived; deemed by British PM that it was “highly likely” Putin was responsible. A joint statement was issued by leaders of the US, Britain, France and Germany condemning Russia for “the first offensive use of a nerve agent in Europe since WWII”
• 2018: Putin’s “state of the nation” address in which he announced that Russia had developed a new arsenal of nuclear missiles capable of penetrating US air defences. “The attempt at curbing Russia has failed.”
• 2019: election of Volodymyr Zelenskyy as President of Ukraine
• 2019: assassination of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Georgian-Chechen man, in a Berlin park, which a German court ruled last year was orchestrated by the Kremlin
• 2019, July 12: Putin essay released “”On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, the thrust of which was that uniting Ukranian lands with Russia would only be righting a historical wrong
• 2019: Russia received four-year ban from all major sporting events by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA); this includes the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and Paralympics and football’s 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Athletes who can prove they are untainted by the doping scandal will be able to compete under a neutral flag
• 2020: Russian opposition figure and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent and was hospitalized in serious condition. According to the EU, the poisoning became possible “only with the consent of the Presidential Executive Office” and with the participation of the FSB
• 2020, August: Russia introduced Sputnik V, the world’s first registered vaccine for the prevention of COVID-19; it met with criticism as to whether approval was justified in the absence of robust scientific research confirming safety and efficacy
• 2021: Navalny returns to Russia and given 2 1/2 year prison sentence 
• 2021: humiliating US and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan
• 2022, Feb 24: Russian invasion of Ukraine