With growing anxiety, Putin prepares the Russians for a long battle

In the images released by the Kremlin on New Year’s Eve we see the President Vladimir Putin chatting with the soldiers, exhorting them:

“We can’t give up anything. We just have to fight, keep going.”

Then he adds: “Sure, it’s still there a lot to do“.

As winter approaches and the anniversary of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine approaches, Putin has abandoned his previous efforts to protect the public from the pain of war and now seeks to prepare the Russians, and his own military , for a long fight.

“He’s become a lot less relaxed, a lot less optimistic,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a Russian analyst who studies Putin for her political analysis firm R.Politik.

“It sure feels like it anxietythe desire to mobilize all possible forces to achieve one’s goals”.

Keeping a low profile this week during Russia’s extended New Year’s holiday, Putin did not comment on the Ukrainian missile attack on the town of Makiivka last weekend.

The resulting torrent of criticism from pro-war bloggers on social media was directed at the Russian commanders and it hasn’t hit Putin himself, a pattern evident in months of blunders by the Russian military.

Russia’s Defense Ministry released a statement on Tuesday saying the death toll from the attack had been reached 89 military, including the deputy regiment commander.

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The Ukrainian authorities said the number of victims is much higher.

Neither claim has been able to be independently confirmed.

The statement also said that the main reason the site could be hacked was the use of cell phones by soldiers, a factor Russian military bloggers had cited as a vulnerability.

A memorial service held on Tuesday in the city of Samara, where many of Makiivka’s victims were from, called for revenge against Ukraine, according to videos and local media reports.

The reports did not mention any criticism of the officials responsible for the war.

However, the unusually swift response of the Russian Defense Ministry, which acknowledged the mass casualties at Makiivka the day after the attack and promised to provide “all the help and support you need” to the families of the deceased, showed that the Kremlin is trying to be more transparent in his country than in the first months of the war.

This contrasts with the sinking last April of the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, the Fly.

​ The Kremlin has never acknowledged being hit by Ukrainian missiles, nor has it updated the quoted toll of one sailor dead and 27 missing, which frustrates relatives of the crew.

For much of the past year, Putin has projected an air of confidence as he allowed life inside Russia to continue as normal.

His deal with the public was simple:

Leave the politics and the struggle to us, and you will not feel significant pain for our justified “special military operation” in Ukraine.

Offensive

That ended in September, when Ukraine’s counteroffensive stunned the Kremlin and Putin ordered a military draft that war hawks described as long overdue.

Now Putin is redoubling their efforts further involve Russian society in the war effort.

The new approach was seen on Saturday, when Putin broke with tradition and gave his New Year’s speech, very often, not in the Kremlin, but on a military base, with people from background uniform.

The annual speech is often full of apolitical platitudes, the New Year’s dinner dish for millions of Russian families.

This time, Putin delivered his speech about a West bent on destroying Russia.

“The West lied about peace while preparing for aggression,” he said.

“They are cynically using Ukraine and its people to weaken and divide Russia.”

It was the latest, and perhaps most glaring, example of Putin trying to prepare the Russians for a long war.

Reaction

US officials said they finally see the Kremlin starting to learn from its battlefield mistakes.

Russia is improve your defenses and sending more soldiers to the front, and put a single general in command of the war who was able to mount a withdrawal from the Ukrainian city of Kherson with minimal casualties in November.

Even Russian commanders are publicly curbing their ambitions.

General Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian General Staff, said on 22 December that Russia’s current focus was limited to trying to capture the rest of the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine.

“There are less triumphalismRuslan Leviev, a Russian military analyst with the open source analysis group Conflict Intelligence Team, said in an interview.

He said he was surprised how quickly the Russian Defense Ministry acknowledged losses at Makiivka, noting that it usually takes days for the ministry to admit large losses, if at all.

Putin himself appears to be paying renewed attention to the home front:

while trying to avoid any possible discontent with the terrible consequences of the war, he tries to mobilize the Russians to support it more actively.

There are rumors in Russia that Putin will soon order a new military recruitment send more soldiers to the front.

Western officials estimate that more than 100,000 Russian servicemen have been killed or injured in the fighting and Russia’s central bank says the country’s economy contract 3% in 2022.

For now, however, the suffering the war has brought to Russia has not translated into widespread discontent.

The economy has weathered Western sanctions better than many expected, while Kremlin television propaganda has been effective in convincing many Russians that the invasion of Ukraine is, as Putin claims, a defensive war imposed on Russia by the West .

Although there was widespread outrage on social media over the deaths of Russian soldiers at Makiivka, Putin himself was harshly criticized within Russia over the incident and was virtually not mentioned on state television.

Military bloggers said the high number of casualties could have been minimized if commanding officers had taken basic precautions, such as deploying newly arrived soldiers to localities safer, instead of grouping them near the ammo.

At the memorial service held in Samara, about 100 attendees waved Russian flags and coordinated the collection of aid for survivors, according to videos and local media reports. Ukraine and the West were the targets of their outrage, not their own leaders.

“The entire West has closed ranks against us to destroy us,” Samara Yekaterina Kolotovkina, head of a humanitarian fund for soldiers and wife of a Russian general fighting in Ukraine, said at the rally, echoing an important theme of state propaganda.

On social media, initial calls by Russian pro-war commentators to charge the officials responsible for the Makiivka losses with treason gave way to more cautious criticisms of local military decisions and advice to avert future disasters.

No one seemed to direct criticism at Putin, with covert attacks directed more often at his top officials.

The instinct not to blame Putin was evident in a post published on Monday evening by an influential Russian military blogger, Anastasia Kashevarova, originally from the Samara region.

“Yes, Vladimir Vladimirovich, we love our country,” he wrote, referring to Putin.

“I love Russia so much that I hate certain characters around you.”

But some analysts believe a wave of protests could still occur.

Mikhail Vinogradov, a Russian political scientist, noted that the audience reaction to military casualties in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s “did not occur immediately, nor in the first year of the war”.

That a public backlash against Putin inside Russia has yet to materialize could mean one of two things, Vinogradov said: either the political system is “maximally stable”, or feelings of frustration are gradually building up and “could lead to an energetic outburst one day.”

“Both hypotheses have a right to exist,” he said.

For the Kremlin, it’s not just war that could inject political volatility this year.

The next Russian presidential election is scheduled for March 2024.

While Putin was not expected to face any real electoral competition, the date is looming as analysts and members of Russia’s elite have widely seen it as a moment when Putin, 70, could make clear who he finally wants to succeed him.

Stanovaya, the analyst, said Putin is very likely to run again:

constitutional changes made in 2020 allow him to stay in power until 2036.

And he believes that tensions between the two factions of the Russian elite – the hardliners, who are calling for an escalation of the war, and the “pragmatists”, who are trying to avoid it – will only escalate next year.

“I think 2023 will be decisive to some extent, as it will determine where the scales tip,” Stanovaya said.

“We’re in kind of a dangerous line.”

c.2023 The New York Times Society