Vladimir Putin is no ordinary two-faced politician. For Russia’s Janus-like president, double-speak, disingenuousness and duplicity are a way of life. For 20 years, he has shown himself the master of having it both ways. But is he about to be found out? As riots shake Moscow, with the promise of more to come, is an end to the long, dark night of the Putin supremacy a dawning possibility?

On the infrequent occasions when Putin openly presents himself to the Russian public, he cultivates the persona of a caring, fatherly figure, not unlike a tsar, valiant in the cause of people and nation. Kremlin publicists project images of a bare-chested, no-nonsense tough guy and stern, stalwart patriot, as was the case on Sunday when he was pictured reviewing a St Petersburg naval parade.

Media are censored, courts and judges are nobbled, and NGOs, minorities and human rights activists are harassed

But the alternative reality was also on show at the weekend, when riot police violently attacked pro-democracy demonstrators enraged by official attempts to fix upcoming municipal elections. More than 1,300 people were arrested. It was the most serious disturbance since 2012, when protests targeting Putin’s rule brought a sweeping crackdown on civil and legal rights. In this netherworld that is Putin’s Russia, any pretence of meaningful democratic and electoral processes has been all but abandoned. Political opposition is discouraged and penalised. Free speech and peaceful assembly are severely restricted, media are censored, courts and judges are nobbled, and NGOs, religious minorities and human rights activists are harassed and persecuted.

Nor, on the dark underside of the Putin presidency, is he the universally respected, almost omnipotent figure his backers and boosters like to pretend. His latest nationwide telephone call-in show in June produced sharp criticisms, despite the risk of reprisals. “Just one question: when will you leave?” one brave caller asked. Another compared Putin to Leonid Brezhnev, whose Communist-era reign remains synonymous with harsh economic times.

The Russian regime’s shocking treatment of Alexei Navalny, the best-known opposition leader, is cruelly reminiscent of that cold war period, when dissidents were jailed and tortured. Navalny was picked up again last week, for no good reason, and jailed for 30 days. Now it is feared he may have been attacked in prison with a chemical agent, as has happened to so many Putin opponents in the past.

Profile Who is Alexei Navalny? Show Hide Born in 1976 just outside Moscow, Alexei Navalny is a lawyer-turned-campaigner whose Anti-Corruption Foundation investigates the wealth of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. He started out as a Russian nationalist, but emerged as the main leader of Russia's democratic opposition during the wave of protests that led up to the 2012 presidential election, and has since been a thorn in the Kremlin’s side. Navalny is barred from appearing on state television, but has used social media to his advantage. A 2017 documentary accusing the prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, of corruption received more than 30m views on YouTube within two months.

He has been repeatedly arrested and jailed. The European court of human rights ruled that Russia violated Navalny's rights by holding him under house arrest in 2014. Election officials barred him from running for president in 2018 due to an embezzlement conviction that he claims was politically motivated. Navalny told the commission its decision would be a vote 'not against me, but against 16,000 people who have nominated me; against 200,000 volunteers who have been canvassing for me'. There has also been a physical price to pay. In April 2017, he was attacked with green dye that nearly blinded him in one eye, and in July 2019 he was taken from jail to hospital with symptoms that one of his doctors said could indicate poisoning. In 2020, he was again hospitalised after a suspected poisoning, and taken to Germany for treatment. The German government later said toxicology results showed Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent. Photograph: Pavel Golovkin/AP

In any healthy political system, it would be Putin in the dock and facing possible jail time – if only for his criminal incompetence. If unrest is growing in Russia, it may be because the economy is at a five-year standstill, living standards are falling, businesses are closing and 13% of the population lives in poverty. Last week, Russia’s central bank warned that economic growth was slowing further.

These chronic problems have several causes. One is endemic corruption at state and local level. Another is the way the government has squandered Russia’s oil and gas revenues, failing to invest in jobs, healthcare, education and infrastructure in periods when energy income was high. Lack of diversification is another structural problem boding ill for the future.

Russia’s political and economic woes share one factor in common: Putin, and the self-serving, unrepresentative, opaque regime he runs. He insists, for example, that US and EU sanctions imposed after his illegal 2014 annexation of Crimea are not hurting Russia. Yet analysts estimate the sanctions provoked massive capital flight, in excess of $317bn, in ensuing years and continuing, dramatic falls in foreign direct investment.

Putin’s popularity, although still relatively high, is sharply down on previous levels. Signs of growing political weakness were discerned in recent decisions to bow to public pressure to release an investigative reporter, Ivan Golunov, who was framed by police; and the scrapping of controversial plans to build a cathedral in Yekaterinburg. In another country, this might have looked like responsive flexibility. In Russia, it looked like cracks in Putin’s once impregnable authoritarian edifice.

The conflicted faces of Putin are evident, too, in Russia’s dealings around the globe. The Kremlin portrays him as a master statesman, out-thinking and out-foxing Russia’s enemies and competitors. With Donald Trump, admittedly, that’s not hard to do. The two men’s last meeting, at the Osaka G7 summit, saw the US president again slavishly courting a leader who opposes much that the US traditionally stands for, and who, Democrats say, helped to get Trump elected by nefarious means.

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Yet Putin’s global opportunism is not the success he likes to pretend. In Syria, where Moscow intervened on the side of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in 2015, Russian forces are stuck in what increasingly resembles a quagmire in the country’s north-west. Putin’s troops are again facing accusations of atrocities, and of possible chemical weapons use, against the besieged civilian population of Idlib.

At the same time, his military and diplomatic alliance with Iran and Turkey is cracking at the seams. Like his unfinished war in Ukraine, his risky meddling in Venezuela, and his covert war on exiled opponents, as seen in last year’s Salisbury chemical attacks, Putin’s international adventurism is proving politically and financially expensive, domestically unpopular, diplomatically isolating, and in the case of Syria, potentially disastrous.

Last weekend’s sudden lashing out against his opponents in Moscow speaks of rising panic. Behind Putin’s smirking public face lies a well-founded sense of mortality.

• Simon Tisdall is a foreign affairs commentator