Why so few big officials have fled Putin’s ship

When someone like Boris Bondarev, a Russian counsellor to the United Nations in Geneva, slams the door on his employer, the Russian Foreign Ministry, and on his home country, it’s only natural to wonder if Vladimir Putin’s system is showing cracks three months into the dictator’s disgraceful Ukraine adventure. The answer, however, is “not really.” Despite the relative failure of the invasion so far, prominent defectors are remarkably few in number. The Russian establishment is not about to implode.
For most of the Putin-era breed of establishment figure, carrying on has more upside than defecting.
Bondarev, a rank-and-file diplomat specialising in arms control, is the highest-ranking Foreign Ministry renegade so far. No deputy ministers or ambassadors have made a show of abandoning ship even as Sergei Lavrov, the minister, has cast aside any pretense of diplomacy and joined the pro-war propaganda effort fulltime, declaring that Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, could easily be a Nazi because Adolf Hitler — Lavrov alleged — had Jewish blood. Even so, it took Bondarev three months since the war began and three weeks since Lavrov’s anti-Semitic remarks to resign and voice some diplomatically mild criticism of the minister, who, Bondarev wrote, “constantly broadcasts conflicting statements.”
Other defectors of note? Well, there’s Anatoly Chubais, the long-time top civil servant, who quietly resigned his final, insignificant position as Putin’s special representative for sustainable development and left Russia without saying anything publicly about the war. A number of propagandists and state TV officials have jumped ship in spectacular fashion, like Channel One’s Marina Ovsyannikova, who disrupted a broadcast by jumping in front of the camera with an antiwar sign, or like two editors of the timid, pro-Kremlin website lenta.ru, who managed briefly to replace the landing page content with anti-Putin material. Others have left more quietly, like Kirill Karnovich-Valua, a senior manager at the RT propaganda network, who has made it known that the team of RT creatives he has led would rather operate as a start-up than continue working for the state-funded outlet.
A trickle of business figures has condemned the Ukraine invasion, billionaire Oleg Tinkov most prominent among them. Ukrainian and some international media had a field day with the story of Igor Volobuyev, a vice president at Gazprombank, which services Russia’s gas export contracts: Ukraine-born Volobuyev not only quit his job but moved to his native country and joined its territorial defense forces; the story would carry more weight, though, if vice presidents weren’t a dime a dozen at Gazprombank, as at many other banks.
But anyone looking for ministers, generals, state TV chiefs, presidential aides and oligarchs on, say, Newsweek’s recent “full list” of prominent regime dropouts will be disappointed. Sure, a few dozen cultural figures have resigned their state-funded jobs or left Russia in protest against the Ukraine invasion — a rapper here, the odd film director or orchestra conductor — but these can hardly be considered pillars of the regime. They are easily replaceable, as far as the Kremlin is concerned. If the rats aren’t running, the ship isn’t sinking, at least not from the rats’ point of view. One can count on regime supporters — a cynical bunch —to make their life decisions with a cool head.

—Bloomberg