Watching Russia

Over the weekend I started thinking about a hypothetical: is there anyone in the Russian national security apparatus who thinks to themselves, “Yep, decision to pull the trigger on the invasion back in February … great call!”

I emphasize “think” rather than “say” since the mood in Russia doesn’t seem like one where doubts are likely to be expressed openly, at least at the upper levels of the national security establishment. People find ways not to ask themselves these questions, even in the privacy of their thoughts. But it is hard to imagine many managing to say yes. The suffering is overwhelmingly in and to Ukraine; they are the victims. But it is hard to imagine a greater self-inflicted wound than the one Russia brought on itself back in February, entirely at a time and place of its choosing.

I raise this question because, as you likely know, President Putin recently declared a “partial mobilization” in Russia, the first since the Second World War, which gives the state power to draft about 300,000 new recruits, though there are signs on the ground that the mobilization is actually far from partial.

If you have been following this closely you know that across the country there have been protests and resistance ranging from peaceful protests, to rioting to paramilitary violence directed at recruiters and recruiting stations. There are scenes of students being marched out of classes directly to enlistment. The enlistments appear to disproportionately focus on the country’s isolated rural hinterlands and the various non-Russian ethnic republics. Meanwhile there has been a mass exodus of young and not-so-young men leaving the country. Some points of exodus have generated traffic jams outside border crossings which can be seen from satellites.

One thing that is always important to remember about repressive regimes with long histories behind them is that they are resilient and capable of absorbing a great deal of civil unrest and resistance. That’s why they’ve been around as long as they have. We should be very cautious about any expectation that the current unrest will lead to the end of Putin’s rule in Russia or even that it will force his hand to limit the call ups or change his course in Ukraine. But the levels of resistance we’ve seen over the last week at least introduce those possibilities really for the first time since the war started in February.

One Russian political analyst recently said that there are three groups in Russia today. There are the nationalist radicals, who unequivocally support the war and want it to be prosecuted more aggressively. There are the dissidents who oppose the war but have been neutralized with state repression. Then there are the indifferent. This is the largest group, most of whom at least nominally support the war but are in a tacit deal with the regime which relies on them to be tuned out or not more than passively obedient as long as they are allowed to live their lives undisturbed by the war across the border.

This is the danger Putin courted when he decided to order his mobilization. The annexation of Crimea was wildly popular in Russia. A new follow-on adventure is popular too, as long as people can go on living their lives more or less as before. But here Putin has been forced to make the war real and costly for a vastly larger slice of the population made up of people who had been content to go about their lives relatively undisturbed since last February. For any government that is a very dangerous step.

It’s hard to declare a mobilization — partial or not — for a war of choice you’re already losing. Mass enlistments in the face of that kind of the resistance also have great risks for military morale. No one likes getting drafted: if you wanted to serve you could have enlisted. But getting drafted into a conflict that is going badly and really wasn’t necessary in the first place takes that to a new level. In protests in Moscow and St Petersburg protestors have been arrested and then enlisted directly from the local police station. Doing this in isolated cases can make an example of people. But it goes without saying that forcibly enlisting anti-war protestors into the army does no favors for morale.

Don’t be expecting the Putin regime to fall anytime soon. But Putin is doubling down on the losses in Ukraine in a way that really for the first time puts the future of his rule in some sort of question.