“Outside pressure on Russia, understood as politically-motivated and orchestrated from the U.S., leads to more national cohesion,” Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, said on Wednesday.
“Various sanctions are being turned into instruments of nation-building.”
Putin’s popularity, supported by state television, is already high. Opinion polls regularly give him an approval rating of around 80 percent.
But casting the IOC ban as a dastardly Western plot to hurt Russia, something he did when Russian athletes were banned from last year’s Summer Olympics in Rio over doping, could help him mobilize the electorate.
Public anger over the IOC move could help Putin overcome signs of voter apathy and ensure a high turnout which, in the tightly controlled limits of the Russian political system, is seen as conferring legitimacy.
There were early signs that fury over the IOC’s decision was duly stirring patriotic fervor.
“Russia is a superpower,” Alexander Kudrashov, a member of the Russian Military Historical Society, told Reuters on Moscow’s Red Square after the IOC ruling.
Without Russia, he said, the Olympics would not be valid. He linked the decision to a Western anti-Russian campaign which many Russians believe took hold after Russia annexed the Crimea peninsula from Ukraine in 2014.
“Choosing between the people in Crimea, who wept when the Russian flag was run up and who were doomed to genocide, and sportspeople taking first place on the podium, I choose the people who couldn’t defend themselves,” Kudrashov said.
