Mass protests have become a common phenomenon. In 2019, they occurred in nearly every corner of the globe and in economies of all kinds—developed and developing, democracies and autocracies, places with high and low inequality, resource-rich and -poor. The incidence of strikes and demonstrations spiked in 2011—the year of the Arab Spring—and has stayed elevated since then (Figure 1). More recently protests spread to Latin America, Hong Kong, and Middle Eastern countries, including Algeria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran, which were relatively unaffected by the Arab Spring events. What is going on? Has the world entered a period of perpetual social unrest?

Figure 1. The number of demonstrations and armed conflicts between 1995 and 2015

Sources: Witte, Burger and Ianchovichina (2020) “Subjective Well-being and Peaceful Uprisings” Kyklos 73: 120-158 using CNTS (2015) for the number of demonstrations and Pettersson & Wallensteen (2015) for the number of armed conflicts.

It is easy to miss the big picture if one simply looks at the triggers of protests, which differ considerably across countries. In many cases, protests have been sparked by austerity measures such as increases in the prices of public services, cuts in public sector employment, reforms reducing or eliminating entitlement benefits, or fuel and food price hikes. In other cases, triggers have been political, many of them linked to instances of election fraud or power struggles during periods of political transition, events exposing abuse of power by authorities, or the passing of laws and regulations that either limit citizens’ rights or discriminate against certain groups. Protests have also occurred following incidents revealing social injustice or corruption.

These triggers may serve as sparks for the unrest, but they tell us little about the fuel and the conditions needed to spread and sustain the fire. Several theories can help us think about the grievances that fuel protests and the context that determines the extent to which people can voice these grievances in an organized way (Figure 2). Two of the dominant theories emphasize the importance of grievances. The first one—known since antiquity—tells us that high and rising economic inequality is toxic to social cohesion and harmful to political stability. The second one  tells us that grievances linked to feelings of relative deprivation—defined as the gap between expectations and achievement—increase the likelihood of popular uprisings.

Other theories focus on the context, which determines whether people can in fact organize and rebel against those in power (Figure 2). Without resources and skills, it is impossible to mobilize mass participation in nonviolent protests. Proponents of the resource-mobilization theory point out that (online) social networks have made it much easier to organize large protests as well as to spread unrest through contagion. Countries that are unable to suppress mobilization are especially likely to experience social unrest, according to the political-opportunity theory. As countries become more developed and urbanized and their citizens more educated and affluent, people’s values change and they start placing greater emphasis on political participation and civil rights. Economic development therefore can also increase the probability of protests, according to the modernization theory.

Figure 2. Root causes of peaceful uprisings: A guiding framework

Source: Modified from Witte, Burger and Ianchovichina (2020) “Subjective Well-being and Peaceful Uprisings” Kyklos 73: 120-158.

These theories are not new. Yet, surprisingly little is known about their empirical validity. The inequality and grievance-based theories have been tested in the context of armed uprisings and civil wars, not peaceful protests. Erica Chenoweth and Jay Ulfelder provide the first systematic examination of the structural theories for peaceful uprising and show that neither grievance-based models, nor models based on other explanations, including modernization, resource-mobilization, and political-opportunity theories, provide reliable predictions of nonviolent uprisings.

In a recent paper we tackle this issue again. Unlike Chenoweth and Ulfelder, in addition to objective data, we use subjective well-being indicators to adequately capture popular grievances. We also propose a new framework to empirically test the theories of social unrest (Figure 2) in which we focus on grievances while also controlling for and testing the importance of political opportunity, resource mobilization, and modernization contexts.

Using data for 118 countries from 2007 to 2014, we find that the incidence of peaceful protests and strikes tends to rise during growth slowdowns and recessions as well as during times of decreased subjective well-being, manifested in an increased incidence of suffering (Figure 3), and largely reflecting deteriorating living conditions and a decrease in the perceived ability of people to lead a purposeful and meaningful life. Increase in oil rents also tends to be associated with heightened risk of nonviolent uprisings, presumably because the increased rents widen the gap between aspirations and achievement. We do not find any evidence that increased suffering raises the probability of a civil war—a result suggesting plausibly that grievances are a necessary but not sufficient condition for armed conflict. The effect of suffering on peaceful uprisings depends neither on the country’s stage of development, nor on the political opportunities for rebellion and the ease of resource mobilization. This lack of evidence for the role of context for the relationship between grievances and uprisings might be the result of data limitations, but it could also imply that the effect of a decrease in subjective well-being on nonviolent conflict is relatively universal.

Figure 3. Correlates of peaceful protests

Sources: Witte, Burger and Ianchovichina (2020) “Subjective Well-being and Peaceful Uprisings” Kyklos 73: 120-158. Note: Darkest shade identifies significance at 1% level, medium shade – significance at 5%, and palest shade – significance at 10%, white – no significance.

While our research shows that the role of suffering is universal, grievances are often country-specific. In the case of the Middle East and North Africa, Shanta Devarajan and Elena Ianchovichina show that grievances related to a broken social contract, not high or rising inequality, led to the Arab Spring. Despite moderate income inequality measures, subjective well-being in the Arab world was relatively low and falling sharply, especially for the middle class, and in the countries where the uprisings were most intense. Research by Efstratia Arampatzi and others identifies these grievances as dissatisfaction with the standard of living, poor labor market conditions, and corruption in the form of nepotism and cronyism.

Ukrainian soldier inspects a hole left in the House of Culture, in Druzhkivka, south of Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine. (AFP)

Saturday, July 9, 2022

Russians try to advance in east Ukraine 

Ukrainian forces have battled to block Russian military advances into the eastern region of Donbass, a provincial governor said, as Ukraine urged its allies to send it more weapons.

Ukrainian officials reported heavy Russian shelling of towns and villages as Russian forces attacked from several directions.

“Russians are firing along the entire front line,” the governor of the Luhansk region, Serhiy Gaidai, said on the Telegram message system. “The enemy is trying to advance from the settlements of the Luhansk region to the first villages of Donetsk region.”

Russia assembling reserve forces near Ukraine for future offensive, says British intelligence

Russia is moving reserve forces from across the country and assembling them near Ukraine for future offensive operations, British military intelligence said.

A large proportion of the new Russian infantry units are probably deploying with MT-LB armoured vehicles taken from long-term storage as their primary transport, Britain’s Ministry of Defence tweeted in a regular bulletin. 

Blinken says raised concerns with China’s Wang Yi over Russia alignment

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he had discussed Russia’s offensive in Ukraine during talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi during which he also raised concerns over Beijing’s alignment with Moscow.

Blinken made the comments at a news conference on the Indonesia’s island of Bali after the talks with Wang that lasted a little over five hours. 

Russia continues to ‘raise true hell,’ Ukraine governor says

Russian forces are managing to “raise true hell” in Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland despite reports of them taking an operational pause, a regional governor said as the Ukrainian government urged people in Russian-captured areas in the south to evacuate “by all possible means.”

Deadly Russian shelling was reported in Ukraine’s east and south.

The governor of Luhansk, Serhiy Haidai, said Russia launched over 20 artillery, mortar and rocket strikes in the province overnight and its forces were pressing toward the border with neighbouring Donetsk.

Russia continues to ‘raise true hell,’ Ukraine governor says

The first batch of up to 10,000 inexperienced Ukrainian military recruits set to train in Britain over the coming months have started drills, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) said.

The new British-led programme involves 1,050 UK service personnel training the Ukrainian volunteers, who have little to no military experience, at MoD sites across England for several weeks.

The crash course is based on Britain’s basic soldier training, covering weapons handling, battlefield first aid, fieldcraft, patrol tactics and the laws around armed conflict.

Situation deteriorates in Sievierodonetsk — Ukrainian official

A Ukrainian regional official warned of deteriorating living conditions in a city captured by Russian forces two weeks ago, saying Sievierodonetsk is without water, power or a working sewage system while the bodies of the dead decompose in hot apartment buildings.

Gov. Serhiy Haidai said the Russians were unleashing indiscriminate artillery barrages as they try to secure their gains in eastern Ukraine’s Luhansk province. Moscow this week claimed full control of Luhansk, but the governor and other Ukrainian officials said their troops retained a small part of the province.

“Luhansk hasn’t been fully captured even though the Russians have engaged all their arsenal to achieve that goal,” Haidai told The Associated Press. “Fierce battles are going on in several villages on the region’s border. The Russians are relying on tanks and artillery to advance, leaving scorched earth.”

For live updates from Friday (July 8), click here

Source: AP

LANGLEY, Virginia (AP) — President Joe Biden lauded the CIA as the “bedrock of our national security” during a Friday visit to the agency, which also is part of the wide-ranging intelligence effort to support Ukraine’s resistance against Russia.

Biden marked the 75th anniversary of the agency’s founding after World War II. While at the headquarters in Virginia, he thanked the CIA for its work in Ukraine and called America’s intelligence officers “the best in the world.”

Predictions that Russia would invade Ukraine in February provided a public boost for spy agencies that are often criticized and facing new pressure to deliver insights on China and Russia. Biden authorized an unprecedented campaign to declassify findings that have been credited with helping build support for severe Russia sanctions and the ramp-up of military support to Kyiv.

“It was thanks to the incredible work of our intelligence professionals that we were able to inform the world what Vladimir Putin was planning in Ukraine,” Biden told the audience while standing in front of the agency’s memorial wall.

Biden came to the White House with a long history of receiving intelligence briefings, having served eight years as vice president and 36 years as a senator from Delaware, where he led the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and served on the Intelligence Committee when it was first created in the 1970s. The thing he missed most after leaving the vice presidency, he said, was reading the President’s Daily Brief, the compilation of the intelligence community’s top collection and analysis.

“I’ve been involved with your agency for not 75 years, but — I hate to admit it — 52 years,” Biden said to laughs from the officers gathered. “It’s very hard to say.”

Biden has reestablished a more traditional relationship with the CIA and other agencies after former President Donald Trump repeatedly cast doubt on intelligence findings and attacked what he alleged was a “deep state” of opponents.

Still, there were tensions last year concerning Afghanistan, with finger-pointing across the government during the fall of the American-backed government as the Taliban overran Kabul. Current and former intelligence officials worked frantically to evacuate Afghans who had helped the U.S. during the two-decade war.

Douglas London, a former CIA officer who has criticized the agency’s direction in recent years, said the Russia-Ukraine war has shown the CIA is on its way to becoming “an elite spy service again.”

“Its path to redemption has really been facilitated by Ukraine,” said London, author of “The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence.”

Still, the U.S. intelligence community underestimated Ukraine’s ability to resist the Russian invasion and wrongly predicted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government would fall within weeks.

The agencies are reviewing how they assess a foreign government’s perceived “will to fight” — an issue the U.S. also misjudged in Afghanistan last year when it believed President Ashraf Ghani’s government would hold out for months, only for Ghani to flee and the Taliban to take Kabul as the U.S. was trying to evacuate.

Sen. Angus King, a Maine independent who sits on the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services committees, said he’s pushed intelligence officials to review why there were “two significant breakdowns in a year.”

“The quality of the intelligence pre-invasion was excellent and absolutely world-class,” King said in a recent interview. “The problem was the assessment of what would happen after the invasion.”

Most of the intelligence community’s work since the war began has been kept secret. U.S. officials have disclosed that it is providing Ukraine with information that Ukrainian forces have in turn used to hit high-value Russian targets, including the flagship Moskva.

The White House has tried to tamp down suggestions that the U.S. is directly helping Ukraine attack Russia out of concern that Putin may see those suggestions as escalations. Biden has said he wants to avoid a “third world war.”

As Ukraine repelled Russian forces in the first weeks of the war, and under pressure from lawmakers in Washington, the Biden administration loosened its rules on sharing intelligence and is now providing more information to the Ukrainians. It has also committed $7 billion in weapons systems, ammunition and other military aid since the war began.

Ukrainian officials and observers say Ukraine still is vastly outgunned by Russia in what’s become a grinding war of attrition heavily reliant on artillery fire. Putin is believed by U.S. intelligence to have not given up on his initial aims to “neutralize” Ukraine in his eyes.

The U.S. also is involved in shoring up the cyber defenses of Ukraine and other allies against Russia’s capabilities to hack and steal from digital systems. And agencies are on watch for election influence or interference from Russia amid expectations that Putin may use U.S. support for Ukraine as justification for another campaign against an American election.

“Ultimately, the U.S. calculus is this: We want to do everything we can to support the Ukrainians while avoiding a direct conflict with the Russians,” said Dale Buckner, a retired U.S. Army Green Beret who now leads the security firm Global Guardian.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

A Louisiana woman found herself on the wrong end of an FBI sting operation after attempting to hire a contract killer via a parody website “linked directly” to the bureau’s internet crime squad, according to a federal complaint first obtained by The Daily Beast.

New Orleans resident Zandra Ellis was arrested earlier this week in the parking lot of the self-described “fanciest Waffle House” in America. She is the latest unlucky customer to allegedly fall prey to the satirical offerings on Rent-A-Hitman.com, a website run by a California IT specialist that has already ensnared numerous others looking to have someone knocked off.

“Got a problem that needs resolving?” the site asks, archly. “With over 17,985 U.S. based field operatives, we can find a solution that’s right for you!”

Glowing testimonials displayed prominently on the site feature satisfied “customers” from across the U.S. One, from “Abigail P.,” reads, “My consultation was fast and free and they took care of everything while I was on vacation. Highly recommended!” Another, from “Stuart M.,” says, “My old grouchy landlord was a real problem and wouldn’t leave my family alone. I filled out the service request form and within days, my issue was completely resolved. Would highly recommend!”

In a clever play on the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), which protects patients’ sensitive medical information, Rent-A-Hitman assures clients that their identities “will remain private as required under HIPPA, the Hitman Information Privacy & Protection Act of 1964.” However, the site, which started as a joke but has reportedly helped foil more than 150 murders since, in fact works directly with law enforcement.

“I get requests every single day,” Rent-A-Hitman.com owner and administrator Robert Innes told The Daily Beast on Friday. “Despite the attention in the news media, podcasts, online videos, people still see this as a place where they can attempt to hire a hitman. It’s mind-boggling. I just don’t get it.”

Ellis contacted Rent-A-Hitman on June 30, states the complaint, which was filed in the Eastern District of Louisiana and unsealed Thursday.

Apparently still trying to maintain some semblance of anonymity, Ellis allegedly submitted a service request form under the name Jasmine D. Brown. After providing her email, phone number, and physical address, “Brown” said she wanted to have a woman identified in court filings as “B.H.,” killed, the complaint says. She allegedly entered B.H.’s phone number, address, and Instagram handle into the appropriate field, and noted, “I would like her dead since she is trying to kill me.”

About 24 hours later, Innes—who goes by “Guido Fanelli” on the site and is identified as “R.I.” in the complaint—contacted “Brown” and “asked if she still required the requested services and if she wanted to be placed in contact with a field operative for her free consultation,” the filing states. Exactly one minute later, the answer came back: “Yes.”

Innes told The Daily Beast that he gives all potential customers a “cooling-off period” for them to change their minds. He said Ellis’ request seemed particularly violent, and that she had included photos of the intended target. Innes checked out the names and determined they were indeed real people, leading him to believe she was serious.

“At approximately 9:44 PDT, R.I. emailed [Ellis] and asked why the name provided on the service request form read ‘Jasmine D. Brown’ but the name associated with email address beautiful8honey@zohomail.com depicted ‘Zandra Ellis,’” it continues.

Ellis replied, “I didn’t want my real name out just in case this isn’t real or if it comes back to me or so I wouldn’t go to jail for wanting something like this done,” the complaint says. “I just didn’t want it to fall back on me.”

On July 3, Innes reported Ellis’ request to the FBI National Threat Operations Center. On July 5, an undercover FBI agent reached out to Ellis to go over the plan.

In a text message, the undercover agent introduced himself as “Ace,” and asked Ellis if she was still interested in going through with the job, the complaint states. After Ellis said she was, the agent inquired as to when she would like to “make that move.”

“Depends on the price,” Ellis responded.

The two eventually agreed on a “G,” or $1,000, according to the complaint.

“The [undercover agent] informed Ellis that she would be required to provide ten percent of the payment which would be $100 dollars,” the complaint continues. “Ellis responded, ‘ok cool I got the 100 but will need jus [sic] a lil time for the rest unless I can do installments lol.’ The [undercover agent] asked Ellis where she wanted to meet and Ellis replied, ‘Waffle House on Canal St cool wit u???’”

On the afternoon of July 6, the undercover agent showed up at the Waffle House to meet with Ellis, who arrived pushing a small child in a stroller.

They sat at the counter to discuss the upcoming hit, and the undercover agent secretly recorded the conversation, according to the complaint.

“Ellis told the [undercover agent]… that she had been feuding with B.H. over social media because the two women had children by the same male who was not identified by name,” the complaint states. “Ellis maintained that if someone wanted her and her unborn child dead that they had to go.”

Ellis allegedly handed over the agreed-upon $100 down payment to the undercover agent, who asked her how she wanted confirmation that the assassination was successful. The complaint says she replied that she had “filled that part out online,” but said that “a code word would be fine.”

As for the balance due, Ellis allegedly told the undercover agent that she got paid every two weeks and planned to devote at least $250 from each check to it. Once the $1,000 was paid down, the undercover agent said the job would “get done.”

In the meantime, the undercover agent asked, did Ellis have anything to protect herself?

“Ellis glanced at her backpack and told the [undercover agent], ‘When you see me with this I’m always strapped,’” the complaint states. “When Ellis exited Waffle House she was arrested and found to be in possession of a Ruger .308 pistol containing live rounds.”

She is now charged with use of interstate commerce facilities in the commission of murder-for-hire.

“When a life is in jeopardy, I want [the case] to get into capable hands,” Innes told The Daily Beast. “Fortunately, a life was saved in this process.”

Requests for hitmen have spiked enormously in 2022, Innes said, explaining that he alerts authorities when requests appear to be significant threats, and ignores the inevitable pranksters.

In 2020, Rent-A-Hitman.com received 58 “actionable” requests, according to Innes. In 2021, it received 56. In the first six months of 2022, the site has received 331 actionable service requests. Of those, Innes said 67 percent have been people looking to retaliate against somebody else, such as a bully, a landlord, a boss, or a spouse.

One Alaska man requested that the victim’s lungs be removed from his chest cavity, Innes said. An East Coast woman wanted a bullet put in the head of a district attorney she thought was too soft on crime. One requester in Indiana who said her roommate wouldn’t leave asked that the interloper be pinned to the wall with knives through her wrists and ankles, her abdomen sliced open, and her heart set aside “in a cooler with ice.”

If convicted, Ellis—who does not yet have a lawyer listed in court records and was unable to be reached for comment—faces up to 10 years in federal prison.

President Joe Biden praised the Central Intelligence Agency’s efforts to expose Russia’s plans to invade Ukraine, telling the staff that they had “punched a gigantic hole” in President Vladimir Putin’s objectives. 

“It was thanks to the incredible work of our intelligence professionals that we were able to forewarn the world what Vladimir Putin was planning in Ukraine,” Biden said during his first visit as president to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. “We saw what he was doing. You saw it, the forces he was amassing, the plans he was making.”

In his speech on the night of the invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, which Philip Short describes as “pulsating with anger and resentment” at 30 years of Russian humiliation, Putin seethed: “They deceived us… they duped us like a con artist… the whole so-called western bloc, formed by the United States in its own image is… an empire of lies.” For those who dismiss the speech and the invasion that followed as the words and actions of a man gone mad, dying or out of contact with reality due to Covid isolation, this new biography should be compulsory reading.

As Short observes, however authoritarian and corrupt modern Russia may be, “national leaders invariably reflect the society from which they come, no matter how unpalatable that thought may be to the citizens”. While his people may have been as surprised as the rest of the world at the timing, the invasion hardly came out of the blue and many Russians, not all blinded by propaganda, support it. For as the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, commented a couple of weeks later: “This is not actually, or at least primarily… about Ukraine. It reflects the battle over what the world order will look like. Will it be a world in which the west will lead everyone with impunity and without question?”

Running through all Putin’s thinking was a clear belief that 1991 was a catastrophe for Russia

Refreshingly, Short, in this meticulous biography of a man portrayed elsewhere as a 21st-century monster, refuses to moralise, opting instead to lay out how Putin’s recent actions can be seen as the consequence of the 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The former BBC correspondent is at his best when pushing us to see the world from a Russian perspective. The importance of this is neatly illustrated in the publisher’s own claims for the book: “What forces and experiences shaped him [Putin]? What led him to challenge the American-led world order that has kept the peace since the end of the cold war?” Short relentlessly traces the journey Putin has taken in rejecting that “peace”, the Pax Americana, the unipolar world in which, according to Russia expert Strobe Talbott, then US deputy secretary of state, “the US was acting as though it had the right to impose its view on the world”. From Moscow, Putin watched the US openly intervene in elections whenever it chose, encourage the break-up of the sovereign state of Serbia using bombs, invade Iraq on a tissue of falsehoods and then overthrow Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi without any UN resolution. As Putin commented in one of his acid asides that pepper Short’s account, when it came to concocting fables “those of us in the KGB were children compared to American politicians”. No wonder Xi Jinping of China and much of the world demur at the west’s claim to have done nothing to provoke the nightmare that has descended on Ukraine.

For all his recent whitewashing of Stalinism and Soviet history, in the early 1990s Putin understood the 1917 revolution had taken the country to an economic and political dead end. In his words, “the only thing they had to keep the country within common borders was barbed wire. And as soon as this barbed wire was removed, the country fell apart.” Yet running through all Putin’s thinking was a clear belief that the break-up of the Union in 1991 was a catastrophe for Russia; what was lost was not the Soviet dream but a country that physically stretched from Poland to the Pacific and historically back to Peter the Great and before. Putin mourned: “It was precisely those people in December 1917 who laid a time bomb under this edifice… which was called Russia… they endowed these territories with governments and parliaments. And now we have what we have.” Except we do not. For Putin and many of his fellow Russians have never understood how a country they believe saved the world from fascism at staggering personal cost just 50 years before dissolved in a matter of weeks.

‘Loyalty is a trademark and his friends have done very, very well over the years’: Putin speaking at a rally in Moscow, February 2012. Photograph: Yuri Kadobnov/AFP/Getty Images

Strikingly, the occasions Short records when outsiders have witnessed Putin’s inscrutable mask fracture nearly all relate to these “lost” lands, countries whose independent existence was to him an impossible outrage. There is the rant about Estonia to the British ambassador or former French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s magnificent record of Putin’s “violent diatribe” over Georgia and its leader, who should be “hung by his balls”. That only ended when Sarkozy retorted: “So your dream is to end up like Bush, detested by two-thirds of the planet?” Putin burst out laughing. “You scored a point there.” Finally, most importantly, over Ukraine, which, whisper it quietly, in its present shape truly was a creation of Stalin and Khrushchev. The tragedy may be that it has taken Putin’s actions, the atrocities committed by the Russian army and tens of thousands of deaths, to finally prove Ukraine’s existence to the man himself.

Critics point to Putin’s work for the KGB as revealing the core of the man, as so often investing its members with inhuman powers of control, deception, amorality and evil. Short, instead, places the real shaping of the man both before and after his KGB years. Born in the harsh courtyards of postwar Leningrad, he emerged a cautious operator, shy and unreadable, but with a startling streak of brutality. Working for the city’s famously liberal mayor through the whirlwind of chaos and violence that swept his city and Russia in the early 1990s, he forged lasting bonds with everyone from the new business elite to leading mafia bosses and senior players in the Kremlin. He labelled himself a bureaucrat, not a politician. Avoiding conspicuous consumption and not known for swimming in the oceans of corruption around him, he was at the same time not above buying himself a dissertation towards a Candidate of Sciences degree, whose subject was “Strategic Planning for the Rehabilitation of the Mineral Resources Base in the Leningrad Oblast”. Its true author, according to Short, would later receive “several hundred million dollars’ worth of shares”. Loyalty is a trademark and his friends have done very, very well over the years, as the puritan has spectacularly lost his inhibitions. His subsequent rise was public yet shadowy, a sequence of well-chosen battles engaged when he knew he could win.

Who remembers that Putin asked the BBC’s Bridget Kendall to moderate the first of his annual phone-ins to speak to the nation and the world?

Ironies haunt the book: “Those who believe that [military force] is the most efficient instrument of foreign policy in the modern world will fail again and again… One cannot behave in the world like a Roman emperor,” he said after one US military adventure. Equally haunting are the lost opportunities to avoid rubbing a proud nation’s nose in their defeat at every turn: expanding Nato to Russia’s very borders, breaking at the very least the spirit of clear promises; or not taking seriously Putin’s coherent attempt to create a joint front against radical Islam after 9/11, when he defied his own military’s cold war warriors to help Bush. Torture in Chechnya, it seems, can never be the same as torture in Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib to the victors. “We won, they didn’t,” trumped Bush senior in 1991; Clinton said “Yeltsin could eat his spinach”, while Obama more recently dismissed Russia as simply a “regional” power.

Short is too astute to indulge in easy post-event speculation about different outcomes. Instead, he charts the inexorable march away from the genuine more liberal aspirations of Putin’s early days to the harsh autocratic isolated tsar of recent years, from a Russia culturally and mentally in Putin’s words “an inalienable part of Europe” to the present rupture, which will surely separate it for at least a generation. Who remembers that Putin asked the BBC’s Bridget Kendall to moderate the first of his annual phone-ins to speak to the nation and the world? Now, he talks of the end of the “so-called liberal idea” while promoting traditional Russian spiritual values, the collective over the individual, rejecting the west in tones redolent of Soviet propaganda. But will a younger generation who have grown up feeding on internet social media, able to travel freely and getting information how and when they like, really admire an authoritarian regime that is rotten to its core? That was the challenge laid down by the anti-corruption campaigner, Alexei Navalny, and he had to be locked away. Can the ageing tsar, whose acolytes still seem keen to educate their offspring in Britain and the US when not out sailing on ever-larger yachts, really believe himself a persuasive model for those ancient values?

There is a blank evenness to Short’s prose, a steady accumulation of information built through intelligence and concentration on detail with emotions coiled tight, which makes this book a perfect mirror to its subject. He calls Putin a liar, regularly, but again and again he pulls back from laying direct responsibility on him for some of the more egregious acts. “Hard to judge” or “Nothing concrete suggests” and other such qualifiers litter his accounts of critical moments. Sometimes, they usefully temper the more extreme personal charges against Putin. Overall, however, they let him escape true responsibility, not for individual crimes, but for failing to transform Russia, instead reaching back to an arthritic mythical past, not forward to a different future.

The result is a step-by-step journey, whose penultimate chapter is a little surprisingly called “The Endgame”, hobbled by being published as the climax approaches, not after the event. Short, let alone history, has not had time to judge the success or failure of the latest horrifying act in Putin’s astonishing drive to make Russia great again.

Film-maker Angus Macqueen has helped create a platform of award-winning documentaries, Russia On Film

• Putin: His Life and Times by Philip Short is published by Bodley Head (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

Brought to you by Penguin.

Vladimir Putin is a pariah to the West.

Alone among world leaders, he has the power to reduce the United States and Europe to ashes in a nuclear firestorm and has threatened to do so. He invades his neighbours, most recently Ukraine, meddles in Western elections and orders assassinations inside and outside Russia. The regime he heads is autocratic and corrupt.

Yet many Russians continue to support him. Despite Western sanctions, the majority have been living better than at any time in the past. By fair means or foul, under Putin’s leadership, Russia has once again become a force to be reckoned with.

Philip Short’s magisterial biography explores in unprecedented depth the personality of its enigmatic and ruthless leader and demolishes many of our preconceptions about Putin’s Russia. Since becoming president in 2000, his obsession has been to restore Russia’s status as a great power, unbound by Western rules. What forces and experiences shaped him? What led him to challenge the American-led world order that has kept the peace since the end of the Cold War?

To explain is not to justify. Putin’s regime is dark. He pursues his goals relentlessly by whatever means he thinks fit. But on closer examination, much of what we think we know about him turns out to rest on half-truths.

This book is as close as we will come to understanding Russia’s ruler. It also makes us revise long-held assumptions about the course of global politics since the end of the Cold War.

For most of his time in office, Vladimir Putin has worked hard to hide his personality. There have been occasional revelatory moments where he has shown character, generally in the form of petulance and pettiness. These have been exceptions rather than the norm.

he result has been that people have read what they have wanted to into Putin. In the first years of his rule, this worked to his advantage. Western leaders such as Tony Blair, George W Bush (who infamously looked into Putin’s eyes, saw his soul and liked what he saw) and Gerhard Schröder saw him as someone they could do business with.

Likewise, many Russians believed he shared their values. In the early 2000s, they saw Putin as someone very different to his precedessor Boris Yeltsin: sober, clear-eyed, active, young and untainted with the disasters of Russia’s 1990s. For nationalists, he was a nationalist; for liberals, he was an economic liberal and had Western friends. Most importantly, he was someone who believed in the restoration of law and order for people fearful of the disorder of post-communist Russia.

The passage of time, and the invasion of Ukraine and the horrors that it has brought, have tarnished Putin’s brand. He is now seen as the personification of evil, and we should, it has been argued, have always known he was this bad. Everything that has happened in the last 20 years in Russia is his fault in this view: Putin is simply the old KGB personified and in power.

But what’s the truth about Putin, between “the hope of many, East and West” in the early 2000s and “the Stalinist/fascist/imperialist/would-be totalitarian” (delete as fits your preference) of 2022?

Philip Short’s book is the best place to look for an answer to this question. This is the first full biography of Putin and it is unlikely to be matched as a study of the man for some time. It is readable, judicious, critical but balanced, and focused on Putin the person, rather than on the Putin regime.

There is no ‘gotcha’ moment that explains Putin, no single childhood trauma or slight. Short builds up a picture of his character — enigmatic, a mixture of emotional coldness, fits of anger and epic grudge-bearing, and very much focused on himself — by telling his life story straightforwardly and without empty psychologising.

The distinction between Putin the person and the regime is important. His power is great but not absolute; he does not dictate everything that happens. Short’s analysis of the political murders that have happened during his rule is a case in point. He can only firmly link one murder — the polonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko — and one attempted murder – the novichok poisoning of Alexei Navalny — to Putin. This does not excuse him of complicity in other killings, of course. He may not have ordered other murders, but he did nothing to see those that ordered them were punished.

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Putin’s character has shaped the regime he heads, especially over the last decade. His coldness, begrudgery and self-centredness motivate him to hold on to power but don’t always make him an active ruler. His neglect of anything but his own power and status allows the regime to do bad things, not always because he wills them but because he does nothing to end corruption, incompetence, bad governance or the toadyism that prompts subordinates to kill on his behalf. Short’s Putin either does not feel the pain his regime causes or does not care.

This has been particularly noticeable since he came back to the presidency in 2012 after a spell as prime minister under president Dmitry Medvedev. Putin returned because Medvedev began to think too much of himself and because Putin did not trust him to maintain political stability. Putin had no a grand plan for his new presidential terms. His promotion of traditional moral values as Russia’s ideology after 2012 were a means of excluding and persecuting liberals rather than the basis for Russia’s renewal. Consequently, Short implies, he has been in power for the last decade not because he wants to achieve anything but because he can.

This view might seem at odds with his pursuit of great power status in Crimea, Syria and Ukraine. Short’s book was being set up to print when the war against Ukraine erupted so his coverage of it is necessarily brief. That war, like earlier foreign policy adventures, fits the idea of a semi-detached Putin, however.

Foreign policy aggression allows Putin to indulge his penchant for making arguments about Russia’s necessary historical greatness and blame the West for not accepting this and unfairly persecuting his country. He may be too jaded to bother with the complexities of domestic politics, but he gets status from foreign adventures. Achieving economic growth is hard. Getting praise for foreign adventurism is easy when you control the media, and it shouts your praises about foreign victories and hides the casualty figures.

While Putin engages in deadly power games, his regime keeps ticking over. When Putin finally goes, this messy, corrupt, incompetent, and violent regime will live on after him for a long time as a problem for Russia and the world. There’s no better guide as to why this will be Putin’s fault than this exceptional book.

Biography: Putin: His Life and Times by Philip Short
Bodley Head, 864 pages, paperback €22.90; e-book £10.99

Neil Robinson is professor of politics at the University of Limerick