Will Putinism end not with a bang but a warrant? Hot on the heels of the Panama Papers’ revelations about multi-billion dollar slush funds, a Spanish court's decision to issue arrest orders for 12 Russian citizens, including senior law enforcement officials and a Duma deputy, demonstrates the new pressures faced by Russia’s elite, otherwise used to juggling the freedom to steal at home with the freedom to spend and save abroad.
In the process, the elite’s social contract with the Putin regime is increasingly impossible for both sides to sustain.
An antisocial contract
The Spanish case has illustrated the way that the interconnection of crime, politics and business in Russia means that — at some remove — almost everyone of substance within the system is linked with out-and-out mobsters. Even figures generally regarded as “clean” by Russian standards, such as Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak, feature in the phone-tapped conversations and extensively mapped business connections painstakingly collected by the investigators.
