How Bad Will The Effect Of Putin's Ukraine War Be On Russia Itself?

World War I was catastrophic for Russian society in every conceivable way. The military was badly led and the Germans out-maneuvered them again and again, leading to a disastrous morale problem that started at the front and infected the entire empire. It was more than just bad leadership. Generally, the soldiers were fighting under especially harsh conditions, lacking proper equipment, supplies, and logistical support. Coupled with the high death toll, mind-boggling casualty rates and the perception of military mismanagement, frustration and disillusionment among both the soldiers and the civilian population spread like wildfire. At least 2 million soldiers were killed and between 5 and 8 million were wounded or captured.

The war also created severe-- almost unfathomable-- economic hardships for Russia— food shortages (including even bread rationing by 1917), severe inflation and economic disruption due to the diversion of resources towards the war effort. The strains on the economy worsened the already bad living conditions for ordinary Russians, leading to widespread discontent and unrest. The combination of military defeats, economic hardships and the perception of government incompetence generated a profound sense of discontent and disillusionment with the Tsarist regime. The Russian people increasingly lost faith in Tsar Nicholas II's ability to lead and address their grievances. This discontent laid the groundwork for revolutionary sentiments to take hold, as various political and social groups sought alternatives to the existing order. In February, 1917, the country exploded leading to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas and a provisional government that tried, unsuccessfully, to establish a democracy. By October, a Bolshevik-led revolution gripped the country.

Hundreds of thousands of members of the aristocracy and economic and social elite classes fled, if they were already dead or in prison. Russia’ war of aggression— Ukraine’s defensive war— started a year ago this week and this week, the fascist head the mercenary Wagner Group, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, warned that this whole ugly scenario could be repeated because of the Ukraine war. He would love to be set loose on the country’s elites who he loathes.

Reporting for the Washington Post, Mary Ilyushina wrote that Prigozhin is blaming Russia’s poor showing on “its detached, wealthy elites” who aren’t committed to the conflict. “In a lengthy interview with Konstantin Dolgov, a political operative and pro-war blogger, Prigozhin… asserted that the war has backfired spectacularly by failing to ‘demilitarize’ Ukraine, one of President Vladimir Putin’s stated aims of the invasion. He also called for totalitarian policies. ‘We are in a situation where we can simply lose Russia,’ Prigozhin said, using an expletive to hammer his point. ‘We must introduce martial law. We unfortunately… must announce new waves of mobilization; we must put everyone who is capable to work on increasing the production of ammunition,’ he said. ‘Russia needs to live like North Korea for a few years, so to say, close the borders… and work hard.’”

Citing public anger at the lavish lifestyles of Russia’s rich and powerful, Prigozhin warned that their homes could be stormed by people with “pitchforks.” He singled out Ksenia Shoigu, the daughter of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who was spotted vacationing in Dubai with her fiancé, Alexei Stolyarov, a fitness blogger.

“The children of the elite shut their traps at best, and some allow themselves a public, fat, carefree life,” Prigozhin said in the interview, which was released Wednesday on video. “This division might end as in 1917, with a revolution— when first the soldiers rise up, and then their loved ones follow.”

Prigozhin, who earned a fortune and the nickname “Putin’s chef” from government catering contracts, seized a central role in the war in Ukraine, first by deploying his mercenaries on the front lines and later by recruiting heavily from prisons to bolster Moscow’s depleted forces. In the interview, Prigozhin said that he did not know how to cook, and that journalists should have called him “Putin’s butcher.”

Wagner led the onslaught in Bakhmut, which culminated this week in Putin declaring the city under Russian control— his first significant territorial gain since last summer. Ukraine insists it is still fighting on the city’s outskirts.

But while Prigozhin’s role in Bakhmut has given him a major platform, he has been engaged in a nasty running feud with Shoigu and other Russian military commanders, accusing them of denying Wagner needed ammunition. He also repeatedly threatened to withdraw from Bakhmut.

In the interview with Dolgov, Prigozhin professed to be guided by love for his motherland and loyalty to Putin. But he also delivered blistering criticism of the war, which the Kremlin calls a “special military operation.”

Instead of demilitarization, he said, the invasion turned “Ukraine’s army into one of the most powerful in the world” and Ukrainians into “a nation known to the entire world.”

“If they, figuratively speaking, had 500 tanks at the beginning of the special operation, now they have 5,000,” he said. “If they had 20,000 fighters who knew how to fight, now they have 400,000. How did we ‘demilitarize’ it? Now it turns out that we militarized it— hell knows how.”

Prigozhin this week again said that his fighters would leave Bakhmut, potentially in a bid to leave Shoigu responsible for holding the city, which Kyiv insists it will retake.

In the interview, he had special venom for the children of the elite and for the many wealthy Russians who have tried to avoid letting their lives be disrupted by the war. Prigozhin, however, did not comment on the fact that this effort to shield Russians has been a central strategy of Putin’s since the invasion started.

Prigozhin said that the grief of “tens of thousands of relatives” of killed soldiers might reach a boiling point, and the Russian government will have to contend with broader anger and discontent, exacerbated by economic disparity.

“My advice to the Russian elites— get your lads, send them to war, and when you go to the funeral, when you start burying them, people will say that now everything is fair,” Prigozhin said in the interview.

Prigozhin’s rants often undermine Moscow’s official line and almost certainly would result in harsh punishment for anyone else. The country has outlawed criticism of the military, and many citizens have faced prosecution.

While regular Russian military officials keep a lid on the number of casualties in Ukraine, Prigozhin said that 20,000 Wagner fighters have died in the battle for Bakhmut. Even if an undercount, the figure eclipses the last official number given by Moscow in September, when Shoigu claimed that 5,937 soldiers had died.

Military experts attribute such a high death toll among Wagner fighters to its commanders’ brutal tactics of sending waves of poorly trained convicts to exhaust Ukrainians, at times threatening the prisoners with death if they retreated.

Private military companies are technically illegal in Russia, but Prigozhin has operated with impunity, deploying his fighters to countries in the Middle East and Africa, and to Ukraine. In Mali, Wagner soldiers are suspected of war crimes following reports of executions, torture, rape and abductions.

While Prigozhin has sought to cultivate an image of himself as a fighter, appearing in full battle gear on the front lines in countless videos, he falls squarely among the Putin cronies who have become billionaires off their government connections and contracts. Like his fighters, however, Prigozhin is also an ex-convict: He spent most of the 1980s in jail for robbery.

So far, Prigozhin remains unmatched in publicity, succeeding where some regular commanders have stumbled, in some cases in humiliating fashion.

Military experts, for example, pointed to a staged clip of Col. Gen. Alexander Lapin that emerged Tuesday, showing him commanding a small group of troops to fight off a mysterious two-day incursion in the Belgorod region, a staging area for Russian forces that borders Ukraine.

The clip, in which Lapin is seen walking alongside a convoy of armored vehicles shouting, “Go forward, guys! For the motherland,” was ridiculed by some Russian pro-war bloggers as “embarrassing” and “laughable.” Local officials, meanwhile, fought off questions from civilians alarmed about a breach in the border.

“I have even more questions for the Defense Ministry than you have,” Belgorod governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said in a live question-and-answer session with local residents after militias made up of Russians fighting on Ukraine’s side in the war stormed a checkpoint in Grayvoron district and infiltrated nearby villages.

Gladkov said Tuesday that one woman died while being evacuated during the attack and that eight people were injured. Russian officials claimed the attacks were repelled, while the militias responsible said Wednesday that they were still actively fighting inside Russian territory.

“We are living in a very difficult period,” Gladkov said in a separate statement.

The disruptions in Belgorod continued Wednesday, with multiple drones targeting a gas pipeline and residential buildings, Gladkov said.

In his interview, Prigozhin said there was an “optimistic scenario” for Russia’s war: Western support for Ukraine wears out, and China brokers a peace deal, allowing Russia to keep occupied Ukrainian lands.

“I don’t have much faith in the optimistic scenario,” he said, adding that instead Ukraine could partially succeed in a highly anticipated counteroffensive, pushing Russian troops closer to the borders that existed before hostilities began in 2014. They could also attack Crimea and continue pressing on in the east, armed with more Western weapons, he said.

“Most likely this scenario will not be good for us,” Prigozhin said. “So we need to prepare for a difficult war.”

Gregory Afinogenov, a socialist who teaches Russian history at Georgetown University, wrote for the Jacobin this week that “If ever there was a war of choice, Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is certainly it, and it is he who bears the responsibility for all its disastrous consequences not just for Ukraine, but also for Russia and the world… Kremlin propaganda insisted that Russia had not come to occupy Ukraine, but they justified the invasion in a variety of ways: preventing Ukraine’s entry into NATO and subsequent NATO aggression, ‘denazifying’ Ukraine, reuniting the ‘fraternal’ Russian and Ukrainian peoples, preventing a ‘genocide’ in the Donbas, and so forth. As indicated by the initial Russian strategy of a blitzkrieg directed toward Kiev and other major cities, the thinking was probably that the speed of the onslaught would paralyze the Ukrainian government and allow Russia to quickly install a new regime led by a quisling like Yuri Boiko, thus permitting the rapid withdrawal of Russian troops or their retention in the country in the guise of ‘military assistance’ rather than outright occupation.” In our country, Russo-Republicans (MAGA) bought all it all, hook, line and sinker.

[F]or most Russians the important conflicts in their lives take place at home and in the workplace rather than in the assembly halls of world governing bodies. Russia’s capitalist economic order and escalating climate of political repression has only served to encourage this tendency to turn toward private life and leave public affairs to those who monopolize them. This is why opinion polls about support for the war are misleading, and comparisons to Stalin’s role in World War II and invocations of “totalitarianism” are even more baseless. Stalinism was rooted in its ability to mobilize enormous masses of the population, while Putinism demobilizes them. As a result, even after a year of war, Putin has failed to convince his people that victory in the conflict is a matter of life and death. He would have had to be a different kind of ruler.

This has forced the state to tread carefully in calibrating wartime demands to the expectations of its population. Until January, thousands were being prosecuted for referring to the “special military operation” as a war. Though this may still be illegal, Putin has now started using the word himself. While Russia’s partial mobilization in the fall seemed at first to represent a watershed moment, the situation has largely reverted to the mean— except for the emigration of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them educated professionals, who are forming yet another generation of Russian exiles who may never return to their homeland.

Those Russians who remain are watching fewer political talk shows, and no flood of volunteers for the front has appeared at recruiting stations. Civil-society support for the troops mostly amounts to donation campaigns. The situation is reminiscent of the United States after the Iraq invasion, but with much weightier emotional consequences, owing to the heavier casualty toll and the rupture of long-standing social and familial ties. Literal or metaphorical escapism is one solution, psychiatry another. Spending on antidepressants grew massively in 2022. Those who actively oppose the war remain as much of a minority as active supporters, however, and police crackdowns mean that they are either already exceptionally skilled at evading arrest or are politically unorganized. Someone who throws a Molotov cocktail at a recruiting station may be a neo-Nazi, an anarchist, or simply a random, fed-up pensioner.

For elites, everything is different. Those of Putinism’s beneficiaries who have expressed anything short of full-throated support for the war have become alarmingly accident-prone. After safely offshoring their wealth, others have renounced all ties to the regime and attempted to integrate into new societies in Europe or Israel, cleansed of the moral stain of Russianness. As in the reign of Peter the Great or the Stalinist Great Terror, places among the elite left vacant one way or another seldom remain so for long. For every aspiring minister or oligarch, the war offers an opportunity to climb a treacherous career ladder.

Above all, this applies to the two political winners of the last year, the Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov and the military entrepreneur Yevgeny Prigozhin, who have staked their future on the growing appeal of belligerent imperial militarism. Both have taken this to the point of mustache-twirling comedy. After a video in which an operative of Prigozhin’s mercenary outfit Wagner Group was shown being brutally executed with a sledgehammer for surrendering to the Ukrainians, Prigozhin demonstratively mailed a similar sledgehammer, complete with fake blood, to the offices of the European Parliament.

More substantively, Prigozhin’s enlistment of prisoners as Wagner Group troops in exchange for amnesty, now being emulated by the official military, leverages Russia’s vast carceral system (with its 99.8 percent conviction rate) to replenish its army’s reserves without having to expand conscription from the general population, a goal that Wagner is also serving by actively recruiting mercenaries abroad. Such strategies demonstrate why Prigozhin’s influence is growing, but they also testify to Putin’s hesitation about asking too much from the Russian people.

This inter-elite competition helps to explain why external pressure from the West in the form of a historically unprecedented campaign of economic warfare has thus far failed to threaten the foundations of the regime. Shortages of key goods have been largely remedied through a $15 billion “parallel import” program (half the total amount of non-Chinese imports for 2020), while global economic fluctuations have resulted in export revenues in 2022 being even higher than they were before the war. While there is some debate about whether sanctions are indeed “working” to undermine the Russian economy, there is no evidence that they have as yet produced any meaningful political pressure on the regime.

Instead, like previous rounds of sanctions on Russia, they have driven out those segments of the cultural and economic elite with the deepest ties to the West while allowing domestic elites like Prigozhin to move in and seize the assets of departing multinationals— thus ultimately consolidating the ruling class behind Putin. There is one important way in which the sanctions have contributed to Russia’s failure to win the war: by restricting supplies of military and dual-use technologies Russia is unable to produce or import itself. The extent to which Russia will be able to remedy this disadvantage is one of the greatest open questions of the coming year.

If the war as a whole is moving toward a stalemate, the specifics remain unpredictable. Western analysts who essentialize Russia’s apparent military incompetence as rooted in its culture miss the fact that many of the same criticisms could have been levied at the Ukrainian army during the initial phase of its “anti-terrorist operation” to reconquer the Donbas in 2014. Since then, the Ukrainians have matured both on the level of strategy and organization and in terms of the competence and cohesion of individual units. There is every reason to expect that Russian performance will improve as its military adapts to a protracted conflict, though by that point broader factors like ammunition supplies or society-wide war weariness may come to play a larger role. The current situation gives little reason to hope for drastic changes in the military landscape, for either side.

…Fantasies of Putin being overthrown and Russia fragmenting into independent states in the face of military setbacks are unsubstantiated by concrete developments on the ground. More modestly, even if [Ukraine] retakes regions lost since February, the practical obstacles to regaining control of Crimea and the Donbas are too great. Beyond the military considerations, the radical nationalism that has become the dominant political orientation of Ukrainian society is unprepared for the task of harmoniously reintegrating the regions lost in 2014. By current legal standards, they contain millions of presumptive collaborators, each of whom has a vested interest in preventing a Ukrainian takeover even if they might not be opposed to Ukrainian control in principle.

Historically, the principal treatment that nationalism in this region has offered for such problems are the waves of mass violence and displacement known euphemistically as “population transfers,” but these will be no more effective in preventing war in the long term than Partition was in South Asia. Neither will referenda be a solution, because they require that most ordinary people and ruling elites on both sides agree to accept the result. That is a compromise that Russia’s forced referenda of the last decade have taken off the table for the foreseeable future.

Yet a cease-fire based on some version of the current line of contact will probably not work either, even if it is backed up by pressure from Biden. Putin’s fear of NATO power and Euro-Atlantic civilizational dominance will grow, and so will Ukrainian revanchism and the Western appetite for a final settlement. The fundamental antagonisms produced and fed by the war since 2014 will be left unresolved; each side will suspect the other of using the cease-fire as an opportunity to rearm and hence will itself rearm preventively

Having come to power by falling in step with Putinist militarism, Russia’s emerging elite will hardly turn dovish overnight, while politicians in Ukraine are unlikely to shun the electoral advantages of nationalist agitation. The outcome of a cease-fire would then resemble the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh between 1994 and 2020— a frozen conflict that can melt whenever one side senses an advantage, leading to catastrophic results. The deployment of Chinese peacekeepers in a Korean-style demilitarized zone along the lower Dnipro may seem like an appealing solution, but at this juncture it appears rather remote: the peace plan suggested by China on the one-year anniversary of the invasion offers a tepid combination of vague “principles” and exceedingly modest concrete proposals.

In the long run, the war will end only after both societies have become too exhausted to fight any further, when immediate peace and reconstruction become more urgent than the more exalted ideological ambitions of the combatants. If Ukraine does manage to recover its lost territories, it will have to develop a more inclusive vision of its nationhood that offers collaborators forgiveness and reconciliation rather than punishment— a way to win back its citizens and not just the land they happen to live on.

If it does not regain them, it will have to learn to redefine itself to accommodate their loss. Putin is likely too old to change his mind about the threat of Euro-Atlantic expansion and the future of Russian great-power nationalism, but his successors, whether they are his venal and bloodthirsty henchmen or the avatars of a hypothetical future wave of mass anti-Putin politicization, will have to accept the diminution of Russia’s standing even in its own former empire. This outcome will not be a draw but a defeat: the failure of Putin’s effort to resist the growth of US power by means of militarized great-power nationalism. Russia’s loss will not change the fact that its principal victims are millions of innocent Ukrainians. This is why war is so bad— for everyone, so far, except Lockheed Martin, Yevgeny Prigozhin, and the ghost of Roman Shukhevych.