“What Putin’s Mobilization Means for the War in Ukraine”, The New Yorker

The Kremlin announced a draft to dramatically increase its fighting force. Will the Russian public fight back?

On Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putinannounced a new phase of his invasion of Ukraine, laying out a plan to call up some three hundred thousand reservists. Putin blamed the United States and its European allies for the decision, saying that Western support for Ukraine necessitated a Russian escalation. Putin also reiterated announcements from earlier this week that occupied areas of Ukraine would hold referendums on whether to become part of Russia, potentially allowing him to characterize military encroachments on those areas as direct attacks on Russian soil. After Putin’s speech, more than a thousand Russians were arrested in protest marches.

To talk about what the mobilization could mean, I spoke by phone with Sam Greene, a professor of Russian politics at King’s College London and the director for democratic resilience at the Center for European Policy Analysis. He is the co-author, with Graeme B. Robertson, of Putin v. the People: The Perilous Politics of a Divided Russia. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what Putin’s announcement signals about his view of the war, how much Putin fears right-wing Russian nationalism, and how to gauge the views of the Russian people.

Is Putin’s speech a military announcement or a response to politics within Russia?

It’s a bit of both. It would be silly to say that putting three hundred thousand troops into the war effort isn’t designed to make a difference. Clearly, they felt that this was necessary. To a certain extent, it’s also a trial balloon for whatever the next phase of this war might be. At the same time, if you talk to military analysts, it’s hard to find people who think this is going to make a massive difference, at least in the short term, in the way that this war is fought.

In terms of the domestic politics, it’s hard to compute exactly what Putin thinks he’s going to achieve. Clearly, at least for the moment, he has decided that he’s not done with this war. There’s more that he would like it to achieve. He doesn’t believe he’s gotten to a point where he can declare victory and walk away from it, which means he’s going to have to continue to impose costs on the Russian people.

As uncertain as he must be about how the military is going to handle the war, he also has to be fairly uncertain about how this is going to play out publicly. Since the war began, we’ve seen polls suggesting that something like three-quarters of the population are behind him on this, but we don’t know, and he can’t know, exactly how robust that support is, and how many risks people will be willing to take. Part of this really is an effort to test the waters, and he may not be totally happy with what he’s seen: there’ve been protests in cities around the country.

You have previously argued that Putin has maintained popularity and power by not asking too much of the Russian population. It does seem like a risk to ask something this serious—something that, potentially, has no obvious military benefit, unless it’s about testing the waters.

It doesn’t make sense, but there’s a whole lot in this story that doesn’t make sense. The risk of public opinion in Russia was baked into this war from Day One. That’s not a risk that he’s creating now by going for mobilization. He had to deal with the risk that Russians were not overwhelmingly prepared for this war. He hadn’t talked about it. The media hadn’t talked about it. People weren’t itching for a fight. They weren’t particularly angry at Ukraine or Ukrainians, and tens of millions of Russians have friends or family in Ukraine. He didn’t know how they would respond to that.

There was also a risk that this was going to bring real economic consequences to Russia. And we’ve seen other risks that maybe he would not have been able to calculate. The war effort has fallen disproportionately on disenfranchised and underprivileged populations, as it tends to in countries around the world. Those tend to be the people who find their way into the military and onto the front lines. That’s created some very real discontent in parts of the country that feel that they are bearing an unreasonable portion of the burden.

Still, seven months in, none of that has turned into a real challenge to his power, and so he might think, I’ve got this. But we had regional elections just ten days ago or so, and they didn’t indicate overwhelming enthusiasm for the direction Putin is taking the country.

How do we know that?

We know that from turnout levels, which were very low, and from the amount of fraud that the regime had to execute in order to get the results that it wanted from those elections.

He’s facing two challenges at the same time. The successful Ukrainian counteroffensive over the past couple of weeks in the northeast part of the country hasn’t provoked discontent in Russian public opinion from people who are opposed to the war. It’s been from people who want Russia to fight harder. Clearly, Putin felt that that was the constituency he had to respond to. He needs to keep those people on board. But, by solving the problem of those who would like him to fight harder, he risks taking some passive discontent with this war and turning it into more active discontent—taking people, particularly young men, a lot of whom have been on the fence in terms of their opinions about this war, and not just making it harder for them to support but giving them very real reason to turn into opposition. How he’s going to square that circle and keep both sides happy is not entirely obvious to me.

Who are those disenfranchised populations in Russia that you said the burden of the war was falling on, and what do we know about how they are responding?

There are at least three groups that we can identify. We are talking about people particularly in the North Caucasus, in the region of Dagestan, from which there’s been a lot of recruitment and which has borne an overwhelming portion of the casualties. It’s a predominantly Islamic region of the country, and one that has been a source of unrest in Russia historically. Another is in Buryatia, which is a partly Buddhist republic out in eastern Siberia, which does not have a history of unrest but does have a very real sense of ethnic and local identity. You have real, grinding poverty, and people have turned to the military as a source of social mobility.

Another constituency that sometimes has been difficult for the Russian government to keep on board is mostly ethnic Russians from lower socioeconomic strata who suffer from poverty and lack of educational and professional opportunities. These are industrial, Rust Belt-type communities for whom the military provides the possibility to move around, to build some skills, and to make some money. It’s a community that often votes for more nationalist parties and is acutely aware of the economic inequality in the country, about which Putin’s government has historically done nothing.

There were some protests in Moscow at the beginning of the war, which I think were viewed as classic antiwar protests. And there were more after this speech from Putin. You also have nationalists opposed to the way the war is being fought, or irritated that victory is not at hand. Can you talk about how Putin balances these?

The nationalists have not been on the street, really, since the war began, which is surprising, because in the past, particularly after the intervention in Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014, the Kremlin did throw some support behind nationalist groups to come out and hold pro-war rallies, calling for Russia to stand up and fight against the West and against Ukraine. We haven’t seen that. Putin has held precisely one rally, but none of the nationalist groups have done anything really visible on the streets.

The protests that we saw in February and March, the initial antiwar protests, which were sizable, were drawing from various communities that have been opposed to Putin for a long time. These are your classic liberals and democrats, and people from libertarian, true anarchist, and left-wing groups. In fact, one of the groups that’s been most prominent in the antiwar movement is called the Feminist Anti-War Resistance. In those protests and antiwar mobilizations, women, and particularly young women, had been prominent, much more prominent than men.

The recent protests have a bit of a different gender balance. We’ve seen more men, not least because they’re the ones who are going to get called up to serve. But it does appear to be broadly the same sorts of communities who have been trying to resist the war, and trying to resist Russia, from the very beginning.

Obviously, the antiwar protests in February and March were crushed. People made a choice between, basically, going into exile or passive resistance on the one hand and going to jail on the other. For a lot of people, that was not a difficult decision to make, but it was made in the absence of any real consequence. The feeling was, “Look, this is a war that we can’t stop. We can maybe do some things to help Ukrainians.” But there wasn’t a risk in it for the individuals. Whereas now, particularly for young men, there is a very real risk of being called up and sent to fight in Ukraine, so that clearly sharpens the mind for a lot of people.

Does Putin actually fear the extreme nationalists as a threat to his regime, or just in terms of public opinion?

We saw the Kremlin harshly repress some of these nationalist groups long before it started poisoning, jailing, and killing prominent democratic opposition leaders. The amount of repression that they used against nationalist marches and rallies was much higher, much earlier, than it was against democratic groups. In 2011 and 2012, things started to change. Democratic organizations really began to challenge Putin in a concerted way on the streets and in mobilizational politics. Putin found that he needed to make common cause with some of the conservative nationalist groups.

In 2014, when he began this semi-clandestine war effort in eastern Ukraine, he needed them even more. A lot of these people were volunteering to serve, whether through the Russian military, paramilitary groups, private military companies, or just as volunteers for the armies of the “People’s Republics” in Luhansk and Donetsk. On the one hand, he really needed them to support this. On the other hand, he didn’t want to become beholden to them. These groups got very angry when Putin agreed to the Minsk peace accords in 2015, rather than pushing the war forward, which is what they wanted him to do. He ended up having to turn again toward repression, putting some people in jail. That has always, for him, been a slightly more immediate threat than the democratic opposition.

Do we have a sense of how well the West’s economic sanctions are working, or at least what Russians feel about them?

The sanctions haven’t had that much of an impact yet on the Russian economy, at least as felt by individuals. It’s had a big impact on the structure of the Russian economy. Imports have plummeted. Prices have gone up, but in ways that are not orders of magnitude different from what people are dealing with in the West.

Russia had a war chest, and they’ve been able to cushion the currency and the impact in terms of employment and wages. But it’s beginning to wear thin, and the government is coming up against the need to make difficult choices about who they’ll support. Although people are still able to keep the lights on and keep food on the table, they have all experienced a diminishment in living standards.

In polls, people have been very clear that they don’t believe that they will be able to find high-tech goods, durable goods, automobiles, that kind of thing, of the quality that they were able to get before this war. As months go by and things break and need to be replaced, that has an over-all impact on people’s quality of life and on the efficiency of the economy.