Putin at home and at war

Welcome back. A tightly controlled political ritual masked as a presidential election will take place in Russia on March 15-17. What will it tell us about the mood of Russian society, Vladimir Putin’s grip on power and the outlook for the war in Ukraine? I’m at tony.barber@ft.com.

Usually, when writing a newsletter about Russia, I draw on FT reports, the opinions of western experts and commentaries by independent Russian specialists, many of whom are now in exile. This week, I’d like to bring to your attention a fascinating essay by a Russian defence analyst who has connections to the political leadership in Moscow and, in all probability, Russian military intelligence.

Two invasions: 1968 and 2022

His name is Ruslan Pukhov, and he is the director of an institute called the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies. His essay, entitled “From ‘special’ to ‘military’: Lessons from two years of operations in Ukraine”, doesn’t represent the official Kremlin line on the war. Nevertheless, it offers insights into the way some people in policymaking circles may be thinking about the fighting in Ukraine and what lies ahead.

Pukhov begins by stating that the military plan behind Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 reproduced that of the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. That operation suppressed the Prague Spring, a shortlived but courageous movement aimed at liberalising Czechoslovak communism.

The two invasions were similar in more ways than Pukhov spells out. Just as the Kremlin sealed its grip on Czechoslovakia by kidnapping the reformist leaders in Prague, flying them to Moscow and eventually replacing them with pro-Soviet loyalists, so the objective in 2022 was to decapitate President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government and install a puppet regime in Kyiv.

Despite glossing over this important point, Pukhov argues that Putin’s invasion went wrong at first because, unlike in 1968, the Russian invaders encountered larger, more experienced opposing forces in Ukraine. Last year, as the Ukrainian counteroffensive stalled, Russia recovered from the setbacks of 2022, but Pukhov stops short of predicting victory for Moscow.

He writes:

Deep positionality, combined with a lack of strength on both sides, dooms them in 2024 to a long positional struggle . . . This makes a protracted war inevitable with relatively stable fronts in the style of the Korean or Iran-Iraq war …

Russian resources are significant, but simply increasing the production and repair of obsolete tanks, artillery systems and shells will not ensure military success, but will only turn the war into a permanent one, with many years of colossal expenditure of national wealth and sooner or later negative socio-economic and internal political consequences …

Russia is unlikely to be able to get by with cheap and palliative political, military and industrial solutions. The radical ‘stress test’ started on February 24 2022, the system will have to pass to the end.

Does the war strengthen or weaken Putin?

As you can tell, Pukhov strikes an unusual line for Moscow-based Russian commentators in suggesting that the full-steam militarisation of society and the economy since 2022 may not work out well, over time, for Putin and his regime.

Data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute indicates that Russian military expenditure increased year-on-year by 27 per cent in 2022 and 24 per cent in 2023 and is set to rise by another 29 per cent this year.

Still, many western specialists take the view that Putin faces no immediate threats. Writing for the Polish Institute of International Affairs, Daniel Szeligowski and Agnieszka Legucka comment:

The ongoing war with Ukraine is a primary factor cementing the Russian power elite together . . . the widespread sense of threat . . . rallies the society around the leader …

The Russian system of power will become increasingly repressive towards its own citizens, but an eruption of social discontent is not to be expected . . . Only an apparent military fiasco — especially the loss of control over Crimea — would contribute to a possible split in the power elite.

A similar analysis comes from Thomas Graham, one of the most experienced US observers of Russia. In a commentary for the Council on Foreign Affairs, he emphasises that Putin sits at the centre of a web of patronage that holds the ruling elite together:

Abruptly removing him risks collapsing the entire web, threatening the status and livelihood of each member of the Russian elite. Self-preservation thus provides a powerful incentive to remain loyal to Putin.

When elections are not elections

And so to the elections. Obviously, Putin will win. For the regime, what matter more are the size of his victory and the voter turnout. In 2018, he won with 76.7 per cent of the vote on a turnout of 67.5 per cent.

Andrey Pertsev, writing for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says:

The Kremlin’s political managers have long known what they want from the 2024 presidential election: a record turnout, and for . . . Putin to get his largest ever share of the vote.

However, even a record victory for Putin will tell us less about his regime and the attitudes of Russian society than we learnt from the short, anti-war presidential campaign of Boris Nadezhdin, prohibited from standing by the authorities in early February.

As the FT’s Courtney Weaver and Anastasia Stognei wrote, this virtually unknown former member of the Duma, Russia’s rubber-stamp legislature, “shot from obscurity to become a release valve for Russians inside and outside the country who are frustrated by the war in Ukraine and the regime”.

Beware Russian opinion polls

How widespread is the discontent to which Nadezhdin gave expression? We should be extremely wary about relying on opinion polls in Russia, where anti-war dissent is a crime and to challenge the official interpretation of history is to risk being viewed as a security threat.

Russia is a country whose rulers murder, poison and imprison their opponents (Weaver examines the history of the country’s poisoning operation including less high-profile cases, sometimes known as “soft poisonings”, in her magazine cover story here). Scarcely had Alexei Navalny, the most prominent opposition activist, died in an Arctic prison colony than the authorities jailed Oleg Orlov, head of Memorial, a banned human rights group.

Still, there are other ways of glimpsing the public mood. Thousands of people bravely gathered in Moscow yesterday for Navalny’s funeral service. And in December, Paul Goble wrote a valuable piece for Eurasia Daily Monitor, in which he drew attention to the huge increase in the volume of letters that Russian citizens are writing to the Kremlin to complain about the war’s impact on their lives.

As far as we can tell, these letters are mostly about issues such as insufficient or delayed payments to Russians serving under contract in Ukraine, or the army high command’s failure to grant leave to soldiers. Nonetheless, as Goble says, “these letters represent an important barometer on how the war is affecting the everyday lives of ordinary Russians and their feelings about Putin’s war more generally”.

Apathy rules — but maybe not forever

Many commentators, Russian and western, stress the role of apathy in shoring up Putin’s regime. Andrei Kolesnikov contends that Navalny’s death will not shake the bulk of Russian society out of its indifference to public affairs any more than did the 2022 invasion of Ukraine or the subsequent partial mobilisation:

Russia’s passive conformists [are] the true backbone of the semi-authoritarian regime.

Likewise, Maxim Alyukov, a UK-based scholar who conducted a research project in 2016-2017 into how Russian citizens interpret government propaganda on Ukraine, writes:

My study showed that Russian propaganda derives its effectiveness from political apathy rather than its ability to persuade. Because citizens understand that their actions cannot affect the autocrat’s policies, they invest only minimal resources in acquiring political information or thinking about politics at all.

However, this is certainly not the whole story.

In an article for the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies, Igor Torbakov situates Navalny in the long historical tradition of the Russian intelligentsia in taking a defiant moral stance against autocracy:

The fragmented Russian opposition now has a powerful hero myth and symbol to rally around.

Ludmila Ulitskaya, a distinguished Russian novelist now exiled in Berlin, told the FT’s Guy Chazan something similar: “In 50 years there won’t be a single town or city in Russia without a Navalny Square.”

It’s a bold forecast, on which I’d like your thoughts. Will Navalny be officially honoured in Russia 50 years from now?

Vote by clicking here.

More on this topic

The future of Ukraine lies in the hands of the country’s western allies as much as it does with its own actions or those of Russia, Evie Aspinall, director of the British Foreign Policy Group, writes in a commentary  

Tony’s picks of the week

• A landmark global tax reform intended to target the world’s largest companies is struggling to come into effect as political support falters in the US and other large jurisdictions, the FT’s Emma Agyemang in Copenhagen and Paola Tamma in Brussels report

• The EU’s planned eastern enlargement has recently seen two big steps forward for Ukraine, but a more dubious one for the countries of the western Balkans, Michael Emerson writes for the Centre for European Policy Studies think-tank