Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a master of unfortunate mixed messages. News that it was, in effect, expelling the US Agency for International Development came on the same day Sberbank was raising $5.2bn in a share offering. So Russia is open to billions of dollars from foreign investors to help develop a mammoth state-controlled bank. But not to a few tens of millions of dollars a year in aid, more than half spent not on the democracy promotion the Kremlin fears but on fighting Aids and helping disabled children.
This is the latest step in a creeping clampdown on civil society that has assumed alarming proportions since Mr Putin returned as president in May. Crippling fines have been imposed on unsanctioned demonstrations. Opposition figures have been harassed. Non-governmental organisations getting funding from abroad must register as “foreign agents”. Three female punk rockers were jailed for two years for a one-minute stunt in a Moscow cathedral.
Yet it strains credibility that the Kremlin truly believes the street protests that flared last winter are fomented by the US. Rather, the order to USAID to cease operations is a piece of theatre that reinforces the narrative the Kremlin has crafted, in lieu of any true ideology, that Russia is surrounded by enemies intent on weakening it. That message does not convince the middle classes of Moscow or St Petersburg, but is still believed by many in the provinces.