Barely noticing the war in public, Putin pretends that time is on his side

Pro-Ukrainian fighters stormed across the border into southwestern Russia last week, sparking two days of the heaviest fighting on Russian soil in 15 months of war. But President Vladimir V. Putin publicly ignored the matter completely.

He handed out medals, met the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, received befriended foreign leaders and had a television chat with a Russian judge about how Ukraine was not a real country.

In leading Russia’s biggest war in generations, Putin increasingly resembles a commander-in-chief in absentia, saying almost nothing publicly about the course of the war and showing little concern for Russia’s misfortunes. Instead, he telegraphs more clearly than ever that his strategy is to wait out Ukraine and the West — and that he thinks he can win by exhausting his enemies.

“Don’t be under any illusions,” says Natalia Zubarevich, an expert on Russian social and economic development at Moscow State University. Mr. Putin, she said, has laid the domestic foundations to continue the war “long, long, long, long, long”.

But while Western analysts and officials believe Putin’s Russia has the potential to keep fighting, its military, economic and political room for maneuver has shrunk, preventing a protracted war.

Even as Putin calls the fighting distant “tragic events,” the war continues to rage — with growing cracks in the military leadership, unrest among Russia’s elite and worrying signs for the economy as the West vows to wean itself further. Russian energy.

On the battlefield, Russia’s ability to go on the offensive has shriveled as ammunition is running low and the months-long battle for the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut has cost the lives of thousands of soldiers. Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group that led the assault on Bakhmut, said he began pulling his soldiers out of the city as he unleashed one blasphemous diatribe after another against Kremlin-allied Russian elites.

To launch a major new offensive, Western officials and analysts say Putin must find new sources of ammunition — and impose a politically risky second military draft to replenish his depleted troops. Yet US director of national intelligence Avril D. Haines told Congress this month that the likelihood of Putin making any concessions in the talks this year was “low” unless he sensed a domestic political threat.

Western officials also remain concerned about the possibility that he could resort to nuclear weapons, but calculate that the risk is greatest if Putin faces a catastrophic defeat that threatens his grip on power.

Domestically, Russia’s economy has proved flexible enough to adapt to Western sanctions, while government reserves have been sufficient to fund higher military spending and higher social benefits. But the longer the war goes on – especially if oil prices fall – the more likely the Kremlin will be forced to make hard choices about cutting government spending or raising inflation.

Politically, some researchers argue that public support for the war in Russia is broad but superficial and can change quickly in response to unforeseen events. This week’s cross-border raids brought the war to Russia in a way it hadn’t before, and sparked unease among military bloggers, who have a widespread following.

Then there is the wild card of Mr Prigozhin, who has turned into a populist politician taking on top Russian officials, and who this week expressed a broad side against the strategy of waiting the West.

In an hour-long video interview with a Russian blogger, Mr. Prigozhin an unlikely “optimistic scenario” in which “Europe and America get tired of the Ukrainian conflict, China puts everyone at the negotiating table, we agree that everything we have already seized is ours.”

The most likely scenario, Prigozhin argued, is for Ukraine to push Russian troops back to pre-war lines and threaten the Crimean peninsula – the crown jewel of Putin’s Ukrainian land grab.

Western analysts and officials doubt that Ukraine’s imminent counter-offensive can deliver a knockout blow. At the same time, they say Russia’s ability to fight the war is steadily deteriorating, as evidenced by the tens of thousands of casualties in Bakhmut and the sharp drop in the number of shells fired per day by Russian troops in eastern Ukraine compared to the height of the battle last year.

“It’s not like the Russians suddenly can’t go to war anymore,” said Max Bergmann, a former State Department official who now works with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “The question is whether they can still play it with some intensity.”

But Putin betrays no public sense of urgency.

He remains isolated in his pandemic-era cocoon, forcing Russians who meet him to quarantine for days. (A cosmonaut honored Tuesday at a Kremlin medal ceremony began his speech with, “Sorry, we’ve been silent for a week in isolation.”)

Putin rarely goes into detail about the course of the war, even though he is in lengthy televised rallies on topics such as inter-ethnic relations. The discussion was so banal that an Armenian civic leader told Putin that his group had sent “300,000 chocolate bars with raisins and nuts” to eastern Ukraine.

Instead, he often speaks of the war he ordered as a phenomenon beyond his control. In television remarks to business people on Friday, he referred to “the tragic events of today.” His silence on the dramatic, two-day raid on Russia this week was a shift from his reaction to a smaller such strike in March, when he canceled a trip and denounced the episode as a “terrorist” attack.

When discussing Ukraine, his comments are heavy on twisted history — as if to tell the world that whatever happens on the ground, Russia is destined to control the country. On Tuesday, the Kremlin released footage of the meeting between Putin and Valery Zorkin, the president of Russia’s Constitutional Court, who carried a copy of a 17th-century French map of Europe.

“There is no Ukraine” on the map, Zorkin tells Putin.

Mr. Putin then falsely claims that before the Soviet Union was formed, “there was never Ukraine in the history of mankind”.

Some Russian officials are already looking forward to next year’s presidential election in the United States, hinting that a Republican victory could turn the tide. Dmitri A. Medvedev, the former Russian President and Mr Putin’s Deputy Chairman of the Security Council, said on Thursday, that was “the most important thing” that President Biden would not be re-elected.

Former President Donald J. Trump, who is the early front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, “is a good guy,” Mr. Medvedev said, and “historically it was always easier to work with the Republicans.”

But there are risks associated with Mr Putin’s wait-and-see attitude beyond the possibility of a battlefield breakthrough by Ukraine. Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, argues that Mr Putin’s “tactics of doing nothing” could increase the influence of hardliners like Mr Prigozhin.

“Russia’s elites tend to see defeatism in passivity,” she said wrote this month. “Putin is already struggling to explain exactly what he is waiting for.”

The sustainability of Russian public support for the war – as well as the economic stability that underpins it – is far from clear.

But some researchers and US officials believe that cracks in pro-war sentiment have already appeared because of the heavy casualties.

A recent report from a group of Russian sociologists, based on dozens of in-depth interviews, argues that Russians view the war as “a natural disaster” beyond their control, rather than something they firmly believe is right.

“This support is not based on fundamental political positions or particular ideological views,” said Sasha Kappinen, one of the members of the report. authors, who uses a pseudonym for security reasons because she works at a university in Russia. “This is not stable support.”

Russia has spent a lot of money since the beginning of the war to appease the general public, increasing benefits and easing the burden on small businesses. The economy has adapted to sanctions and is benefiting from the numerous countries outside of North America and Western Europe that continue to have brisk trade with Russia.

Ms Zubarevich, Moscow’s economic development expert, said the government was able to maintain its spending at current levels, at least until the presidential election in March, when Mr Putin, 70, is expected to fifth term. But a fall in the price of oil could force the government to cut back on things like infrastructure.

“The two sacred cows are government contracts for defense and support for low-income groups and pensioners,” she said, referring to the need to appease key constituencies. “They stay in place for as long as possible.”

At the same time, analysts and Russians who know Putin still see him as fundamentally adaptable and opportunistic — a man who would likely accept a fight freeze if offered, even as he prepares to fight on for years to come. As a result, well-connected people in Moscow see an unpredictable future as they prepare for a long war.

“Putin’s spectrum of options is quite broad,” said a prominent Moscow businessman, “from today’s ceasefire to waging a hundred-year war.”

Julian E Barnes And Oleg Matsnev reporting contributed.